‘You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes’

Razumikhin, drunk in Crime and Punishment

1.

How we learned to create a thunderclap

in a lab with dust and mirrors

How we designed a clap to blast

away every echo

2.

How we moved to new cities

and wrote our addresses in loose font

on the back of every envelope from

every drawer in every office we visited from Auckland to Brooklyn to Hackney

and spoke our names

only with accents formed

in locales we'd lately visited

so no one could guess what we were

3.

How we drizzled cold grease between

our fingers till we forced what we touched

to gleam

4.

And I sewed you into an old sweater

worn so bare it was no longer cotton

but two life-sized holes

5.

How we posed for an unseen creature

as we imagined it shifting

between trees trying

to steal a better look

6.

(How desperate we were not to recall

the horrors of ourselves)

7.

(And how the echoes kept arriving

like swallows crashing

against windowpanes

trying to make glass air)

8.

How we baked silence

behind glass

till it warmed and grew

9.

And when an architect asked

to build a garden inside us

we pried ourselves open and let him in

until we were filled with paths and gates

we did not own the maps for

10.

And when we realised the architect had left for good

how proud we were still to've been

an acciaccatura to his chord

11.

How in the mornings we woke, still drunk,

with rain pattering the windows,

and mist draped through trees,

waiting for our old brains to wake

12.

And when we finally admitted

we wanted to go home

we couldn't be re-admitted

till we re-mapped our own insides

found the end of every path

crafted a key for each gate

and acted cured

of all we'd claimed to know

13.

And by the time we could see

we were doomed

it was winter.

14.

And we drove to the edge of our adopted city

rubbed salt in our tires

threaded snow through our fingers

and listened to the melting layers

of all we hadn't done

the towns we wouldn't visit

the people we'd never meet

and let it all trickle around us like music.