Daylight and Dust
The real horror is a body like an empty glass
slowly forgetting itself – trying to remember
how to hold anything but daylight and dust.
This is how men are taught to feel pain,
learn which parts are allowed to break
whilst they try to make sense
of all the time they can’t trace,
their memory fringed
with the silver of a distant light.
This is how it always was, half-said
in the anaemic spaces of life,
people tangled around themselves
like violets lost in weeds,
like birds declining over an open sky;
as if only empty, meaningless things
can lift off and take flight.
Tom Dwight is a poet currently studying for a PhD in English literature at the University of Bristol. His poetry has appeared in Eye Flash Magazine, Stride Magazine, Peculiars Magazine, and was shortlisted for the Streetcake Experimental Writing Award.
Twitter @tomdwightmusic