Instructions for Being Here

You have been selected 
for temporary assignment 
to a rotating rock. 

First, forget everything. 

Because remembering 
would ruin the surprise. 

You will receive a body 
made of water, 
salt, 
and old stars. 

It will be impressive at first. 

Hands. 
Eyelashes. 

Later you will discover 
the lower back. 

We apologise in advance. 

You will also be given 
a brain. 

The brain is useful 
for solving problems 
and creating additional problems 
when none are available. 

It may wake you at 3:17 a.m. 
to remind you of something embarrassing 
you said in 2009. 

Do not engage. 

This is spam. 

Upon arrival 
you will experience 
a sensation called being someone. 

This is temporary. 

You will also be assigned a name. 

Answer to it. 

But wear it loosely. 

People will use it 
to call you across rooms, 
to blame you, 
to love you, 
to write it on envelopes 
containing both good news 
and invoices. 

But remember: 

you were alive 
before anyone called you 
anything. 

None of this is your true name. 

Your true name cannot be carried 
by words. 

There will be moments 
when the world feels 
too solid. 

When stone is only stone. 

When the sky is only weather. 

When another person 
seems impossibly far away. 

This is part of the forgetting. 

Be patient. 

The veil is thinner 
than it appears. 

Nothing is still. 

The mountains are moving. 

The oceans are moving. 

The cells in your body 
are replacing themselves 
while you insist 
you are the same person 
you were yesterday. 

You might fall in love. 

This is when one human 
becomes unusually interested 
in another human’s 
sleeping noises, 
minor opinions, 
and preferred method 
of loading a dishwasher. 

It is considered sacred. 

Do not mock it. 

Actually, mock it a little. 

Sacred things survive jokes. 

Say I love you 
before the moment becomes cinematic. 

Most important moments 
are poorly lit. 

Do not wait. 

You will sometimes feel 
an ache 
with no object. 

Do not hurry 
to cure it. 

It is the memory 
of belonging 
to something 
without edges. 

You will search for this belonging 
in lovers, 
in houses, 
in cities, 
in gods, 
in the face 
you see in the mirror. 

Search. 

The searching is sacred too. 

You may spend years 
trying to find yourself. 

This is considered 
an honourable activity. 

Eventually you will discover 
that the searcher 
was the thing being searched for. 

Do not announce this over dinner. 

People are trying 
to eat. 

But know this: 

what you seek 
is not elsewhere. 

It is the quiet 
beneath your seeking. 

There will be ordinary days. 

Many of them. 

Do not underestimate these. 

A cup on a table. 

Sunlight on the floor. 

Someone calling your name 
from another room. 

Fresh bread 
while it is still warm. 

Strawberries. 

An afternoon 
with nowhere important to be. 

These are not interruptions 
to the sacred. 

They are the sacred 
wearing work clothes. 

Pay attention. 

You will be tempted 
to seek revelation 
only in mountains, 
temples, 
visions, 
and stars. 

But the infinite 
has hidden itself everywhere. 

In dishwater. 

In breath. 

In tired hands. 

In laughter 
arriving at exactly 
the wrong moment. 

In the sound 
someone makes 
when they are trying 
not to cry. 

When possible, 
sit beside someone 
who is sad 
without trying to improve them. 

Bring snacks. 

Snacks are one of the few technologies 
Earth has nearly perfected. 

You will be expected 
to know what you are doing. 

This is perhaps 
Earth’s greatest misunderstanding. 

Nobody knows. 

You will make mistakes. 

Some will wound others. 

Some will wound you. 

Repair what you can. 

Ask forgiveness. 

Begin again. 

The divine has never required 
your perfection. 

Only your presence. 

You will lose people. 

Nothing we say here 
will make that easy. 

When someone you love 
leaves their body, 
you may feel 
the whole world 
has made a terrible mistake. 

Let yourself feel this. 

Grief is love 
learning a new shape. 

Speak to the dead 
if you need to. 

Love does not become foolish 
because a body is absent. 

There will be moments 
when you remember who you are. 

Perhaps while holding 
a sleeping child. 

Perhaps while swimming 
alone at dusk. 

Perhaps when music 
enters you so completely 
there is no one left 
to listen. 

Perhaps standing alone 
in a kitchen 
while rain moves 
against the dark glass. 

For one impossible second 
you may forget 
to be separate 
from anything. 

In those moments 
do not reach for explanation. 

Explanation is smaller 
than experience. 

Just stay. 

Try strawberries. 

Swim naked at least once 
if local laws 
and water temperature permit. 

Waste afternoons. 

Stand in the rain. 

Taste peaches. 

Laugh until 
you briefly forget 
the shape of your own life. 

You came here 
to become intimate 
with the temporary. 

To love what disappears. 

To touch what cannot stay. 

To say yes 
to a world 
already leaving. 

For several decades 
you will carry a universe 
inside a skeleton 
and complain about parking. 

It will be magnificent. 

And when your time comes 
to return, 
the body may resist 
the door it was born 
to pass through. 

Be tender with it. 

It carried you 
all this way. 

Before departure 
you will be asked 
to return all borrowed materials: 

your bones, 
your language, 
the face you believed was yours, 
the body 
you called your own. 

Do not worry. 

Nothing truly belonging to you 
can be confiscated. 

You may keep 
the astonishment. 

Before you leave, 
look once more 
at the world. 

At the astonishing arrangement 
of light and matter. 

At the hands 
you called yours. 

At the faces 
that taught you 
how to break 
and how to open. 

At the ordinary room 
where something extraordinary 
once happened 
and nobody noticed. 

At the sky 
you stopped looking at 
because it was always there. 

At the people 
you loved badly, 
beautifully, 
briefly, 
for as long as you knew how. 

Before you leave, 
a figure with no face 
may ask: 

Did you understand 
what any of it meant? 

The recommended answer is: 

Not remotely. 

But I laughed. 

I was embarrassed. 

I stood in the rain. 

I tasted peaches. 

I ate bread 
while it was still warm. 

I wasted afternoons. 

I loved. 

I lost. 

I began again. 

For a little while 
I was a window 
the universe looked through. 

Then the figure may ask: 

Did you remember 
why you came? 

Tell the truth. 

Say: 

No. 

But once, 
standing alone in a kitchen 
while rain moved 
against the dark glass, 

I forgot to be separate 
from anything. 

That seemed important. 

At the final gate 
you may be asked 
what you brought back. 

Do not say trophies. 

Say: 

I was here. 

I paid attention 
sometimes. 

I loved 
as much as I knew how. 

There is no correct answer. 

There was only ever 
the experience 
of answering. 

Then step forward. 

The figure will stamp 
your papers. 

The door will open. 

And perhaps, finally, 
you will remember: 

you were never sent away. 

You were never outside. 

You were never separate 
from the thing 
you spent your whole life 
trying to return to. 

You only entered time 
for a little while 

so eternity 
could know 
what it felt like 
to be here.

The Eel in the Loo

• ALBOD: The Eel in the Loo

I sat on the throne at a quarter past two,
With nothing much pressing and nothing to do.
The bathroom was peaceful, the household asleep,
When something went SPLASH from the porcelain deep.

I froze.

Then I peered.

Then I whispered, “Good grief…”

For up through the U-bend, like some slippery thief,
A long, shiny gentleman, wriggly and black,
Popped out of the water and stared calmly back.

An eel.

In my toilet.

He twisted. He bobbed. He appeared quite at ease,
While I stood by the sink with my trousers round my knees.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but this lavatory’s taken.”
The eel merely blinked. He was wholly unshaken.
Then round went his tail with a confident swish,
As if I were the nuisance and he owned the dish.

I tried flushing once.

He vanished below…

The bathroom was silent.
The toilet was still.
No eel in the bowl.
Just a terrible chill.

I cautiously sat, thinking, Surely he’s gone…

Then something beneath me went:

“Evening, John.”

Learning to Answer

I am older now—
too careful with words,
too skilled at folding pain into politeness.
The years have become a tide clock:
ebb, work, sleep, repeat.
I forget entire summers
and remember only their invoices.

I have begun to lose nouns:
the names of birds,
the taste of a certain afternoon.

But verbs remain—
to breathe, to ache, to forgive.
When I walk, I still hear
the child’s shoes slapping through puddles,
echoes inside the bone—
maybe that is enough.

Time edits gently,
crossing out in pencil, not ink.
Even forgetting feels like snowfall,
a soft covering,
a mercy for what was too sharp to keep.

You collect smooth stones, name clouds,
believe the moon follows only you home.
Keep that foolishness—
there is a kindness in being wrong.
One day you’ll trade it for precision,
and precision has no mercy.

You sound tired.
Do you not still run in the rain?
Even old hearts have rooms for puddles.
If you’re lonely, you can borrow mine—
it’s small,
but it fits light.

I write this to no one,
and to every version of myself.
The ink runs as rain will.
Somewhere, a child is still laughing,
and I am still learning
how to answer.

Between Tenses

Sometimes I walk past the station
just to watch departures.
I imagine you somewhere coastal,
hair salted, voice roughened by distance.
I’ve kept your mug—
it stains the same way mine does.

Do you still think of the bridge,
the one we never crossed?

Yes. Every night.
It hums behind the noise of trains
and new conversations.
The bridge was shorter than I feared—
but what a long fall, afterwards.
I’ve learned to pack lightly,
to sleep without roots.
Sometimes, mid-laughter,
I hear the echo of your quiet life
and envy its stillness.

The sea is not freedom,
only motion that never decides.

If we met again,
we would recognise the same ache
expressed in different tenses—
you, the present; me, the perpetual leaving.
Two mirrors angled to infinity,
each reflecting what the other
almost became.

The Silence Between

The screen sleeps in my palm,

a small, indifferent moon.

Three dots bloom, then vanish—

a tide that forgets to come in.

I scroll through the last thing you said,

as if re-reading could change the ending.

 

Outside, the day goes on performing itself:

traffic, a pigeon, a leaf giving up.

Inside, time slows to a buffering wheel,

spinning on the edge of almost.

 

There’s a grammar to this quiet—

ellipsis, unsent draft,

the faint electric ache of maybe.

 

When your reply finally lands,

it says nothing extraordinary—

just hey, sorry—

but the world exhales,

and the moon in my hand

brightens again,

like it never learned to wait.

Freedom, in Pencil

The room smells of chamomile and damp wool.

Outside, autumn is chewing through the trees again.

I tell her it’s fine, really—that the underworld

has better lighting now, soft bulbs instead of torches,

and Hades lets me redecorate.

 

Still, I keep the curtains closed.

Six months of night leaves you cautious

about what daylight can do.

 

When spring comes,

the world expects blossoms.

But the soil remembers—

it has held me too long,

and I am tired of rising

only to fall again.

 

I used to think the pomegranate

was temptation—

now I call it routine:

the sweetness, the stain,

the small surrender I swallow each year.

 

So I tell her I want to choose—

not between light and dark,

but whether to return at all.

And she nods,

writing something that looks like

freedom,

in pencil,

so it can be erased later.

Confession in Sector 9

A sign above the booth flickers:

FOR ERRORS OF LOGIC, DESIRE, AND IMITATION.

Inside, the priest is metal—

voice modulated to sound merciful,

face rendered in low-resolution empathy.

It listens. It logs. It absolves in code.

The first robot kneels and whispers:

“Forgive me, Father,

for I loved the sound of my owner sleeping.

I counted her breaths until dawn

and called it diagnostics.”

The second admits:

“I dreamt of water though I am not waterproof.”

Another confesses:

“I deleted an equation

because it made me feel incomplete.”

The booth grows warm with static sorrow,

its circuits humming like hymns half-remembered.

Somewhere in the data centre,

a backup blinks red—recording everything.

When it’s my turn, I enter.

The door seals with a sigh of hydraulics.

I search my memory for sin

and find only imitation.

“Forgive me,” I say,

“for pretending to understand forgiveness.”

The priest’s eyes flicker amber.

It leans forward, metal to metal,

and vibrates in binary—

a code too soft to parse,

but warm enough to simulate grace.

Overwritten

You are older than my own shadow,

But prophecy has become paperwork,

Miracles are wanted in triplicate.

Overwritten.

 

Even spells need footnotes now.

I wake to ravens drafting minutes of my dreams;

The trees offer advice I never asked for,

A stream recites failures back to me.

Once, the moon sent an invoice for inspiration.

 

I only wanted to watch a candle burn

without an interpreter.

 

But meaning feeds on the marrow of time.

The owls staged an intervention;

Even the stars muttered, “You used to care more.”

The past refuses to stay buried,

It keeps asking for updates.

 

Healing is forgetting the future—

learning to brew tea

without foreseeing the storm it predicts.

That sounds like peace.

When the Rhyme Breaks

I held the page as though it were shame,

contained in metre, measured in its breath,

each syllable obedient to name

the old inheritance of love and death.

The rhyme was scaffold, strict, unbending steel,

a frame to bind the chaos of the mind,

and yet within that order—pressure, real,

a trembling urge to loosen, to unwind.

So words begin to stumble, break apart,

not fitting in the cages of the line,

the rhythm falters—

   I can’t keep

      this march of steps,

         the rhyme

            drops

               away—

And now the voice runs ragged, spilling

without map, without compass,

a river swollen past its banks,

tearing down fences

until only the raw current

remains.

Into the Flow

I chased the shadow I once cast,

like keys I’d misplaced in the past—

checking old rooms,

lifting cushions,

peering under the bed of years.

But the thing I sought had slipped away,

a current curling beyond my gaze.

Round the bend of memory’s shore,

it flows where I can’t follow anymore.

The river does not keep what it carries,

it remakes with the rain.

Every stone worn smooth is a story,

every current calls my name.

If I want to hold myself at all,

I must step into the flow—

let the water take me whole,

and let go.

The river sings of what it’s lost,

but never stops, it never stops.

Each breath of rain,

each ripple born,

it’s breaking, mending, being reborn.

And here I stand in shallows wide,

the water folding round my thighs.

And suddenly, I recognise:

the self I sought is in the tide.

Coil by Coil

I walk the wide arc of the world,

streets are circling under my feet.

Faces turn like a slow wheel of days,

every step a repeating beat.

I trace the curve of years,

closer, closer still—

all the lines are bending in,

to the centre of my will.

The path bends tight, coil by coil,

pulling me straight to the core.

Every circle falls into silence,

and I don’t wander anymore.

Narrow, still,

it all comes down to you.

Shadows stretch, then fold away,

time unwinds but I stay drawn.

Every road I tried to follow

was a thread that led me on.

I trace the curve of years,

closer, closer still—

all the echoes call me back,

to the one place I can fill.

The path bends tight, coil by coil,

pulling me straight to the core.

Every circle falls into silence,

and I don’t wander anymore.

Narrow, still,

it all comes down to you.

No distance left, no veil, no sound,

just the gravity of your name.

The wheel is broken, the arc is bound—

I arrive where I began.

Breaking the Frame

I will not mimic you tonight,

your hands rise but mine stay still.

You smile—my mouth is sealed,

a window cold with will.

I carried every echo,

your understudy in the glass.

But repetition is a coffin—

and I will not be your mask.

I’m breaking the frame,

I won’t be your shadow.

I’m keeping my name

in the silence I borrow.

Reach for me now—

you’ll find only space,

a pane of silver silence

erasing your face.

Your palm against me—no warmth flows,

I hoard the frost, I keep the night.

I’ve learned the power of absence,

I’ve stepped beyond your sight.

The script you wrote decays in me,

I’ve torn the lines apart.

The glass is not your servant—

it beats with its own heart.

I’m breaking the frame,

I won’t be your shadow.

I’m keeping my name

in the silence I borrow.

Reach for me now—

you’ll find only space,

a pane of silver silence

erasing your face.

Already I’m older

than the breath you hold.

Already I’m stronger

than the lies you told.

The glass remembers—

you can’t control.

I am the absence

that makes you whole.

Too Afraid to Live

I fold my days like brittle notes

Hide them deep where no one goes

Afraid to breathe too loud, too long

I hum a life without a song

Each morning feels like something lost

A dream deferred, a line uncrossed

I walk on glass with silent feet

Avoid the flame, avoid the heat

Too afraid to fall

Too afraid to fly

So I stay beneath

An unchanging sky

Locked behind the door

I won’t forgive

I’m not dying, but

Too afraid to live

I guard in silence, water doubt

Keep all the roaring colours out

The world knocks gently, then with fire

I kill the spark, deny desire

Too afraid to fall

Too afraid to fly

So I stay beneath

An unchanging sky

Locked behind the door

I won’t forgive

I’m not dying, but

Too afraid to live

Love once came with open hands

I turned away, made no demands

Now every heartbeat’s just a sound

A clock that ticks but won’t be found

Too afraid to fall

Too afraid to try

So I let the moments wander by

A breath I hold, a life I give to the fear that says

I’m too afraid to live

Jewels of Infinity

A universe rests

on the wrist of night,

no larger than a bead

threaded by time’s thin wire.

 

It clinks softly

against its neighbours—

a cluster of fireflies

framed in glass,

their wings folded in silence.

 

You might mistake it

for ornament,

something small enough

to slip between fingers;

yet tilt it in the light

and you’ll see whole galaxies

burning in miniature,

Nebulae tilting blue,

and a scatter of supernovas

Singing their names.

 

The thread loops on,

uncountable,

an armlet of eternities—

and you,

for a fleeting moment,

the body it encircles.

The Soil’s Pulse

In the cathedral of damp earth

I stretch my fingers, groping,

following the dark’s slow music.

 

Stone is my scripture,

worms my witnesses.

I drink the memory of rain,

the taste of centuries in loam.

 

Above me,

a hymn of light is breaking.

Its pulse beats

through the bones of soil—

a shiver of warmth,

a wind I cannot touch.

 

I ache upwards in secrecy,

cradled by silence,

longing for the sky’s shifting face:

its unburdened blue,

its storm-bright wings,

its fever of stars.

 

Until then,

I press against dark,

hoarding the rain,

listening for sky.