residual traffic space between tissue and bone time it takes to think a word and say it turning inside a lung from

inhale to exhale green flash of mock mirage empty bird house neglected string, weed and straw ink that stains the comma

into the page width of stripe separates

present and future

bearing witness or weeping

unmanned into pillows what the dream seems to tell us is really what we tell the dream nothing haunts the ghosts, they themselves are shivers who owe their sheets’ heft to the breath of the living whose bones’re wrapped in flesh words clap themselves as gusted flags

lungs bellow to stoke the heart’s coals nests encourage the seasons’ churn ink itself sounds the caesura colliding chrome guts the chassis whatever occupants were once obliged to break entropic tethers and be someone somewhere other. The delays will last for miles, sympathy dissolved into hermetic silence of each as each, a thing apart again.