23rd floor

you
are lost
on the 23rd floor
you overlook the emperor
an island
in the sea of what has been rebuilt
after the bombing of time

the cars are so small below
they race past the moat
where gulls
perch on a lonely yellow crane

you write at the vertigo window
to overcome the eerie unknowable
of jetlagged erring
50 minutes in the solid light of morning

you are
lost
on the 23rd floor
under the lid of winter
snowed gulls
blustering on lowly roofs
floating out of the queen of entrenchment

but where is morning now
for the want of her
of her smile
where is the skin
which can properly become morning
and ground you
in the light

here is nothing
every sky scraper the reminder
of an alien script

you are lost
on the 23rd floor
there is no voice to the loss of your sands
it is an instrumental pain
which cannot be reasoned
it is blatant
it burns
the body sits next to its subject

there is an excess of vision
to the height of its impeachment
what is lost screams
but cannot be heard
because it is only
smile and skin
it is the nothing lost
in the nothing gained

in the useless alone

you are lost on the 23rd floor
and there is no murakami novel to hand
you listen to the hypnosis
of his music
you electrify his desert
with your own
you grow wings on yesterday's tomorrow

there is no light to the sun
because winter is a radioactive dump of gloom
and all similes have been lost
in the overuse of the image
and even Durrell cannot rescue
his images from the detritus
which litters the Ionian

what is lost
is what you are
not even what you were
because there is no present
on the deserted 23rd