the sun's shaft of a finger crawls through

the open door, falls on his face

& scratches his dream away

the dark nightmared emptiness swirls

around that pivot of light— the open door

the empty bed, the almost-happened fight

she's gone— the shape she left recited

the way she left— suddenly. the way she

left when she wanted to feel, tired of his

abstract-distractions, something that was

goddamn real. like last time, a smaller time

outside this small time, when his pickle-voice

of acerbic calculation preserved from his

inevitable rot drowned her, droned on before

her about how the overton window has shifted

rightwards, her socialism ideally naïve, how

the left was dead, all the while her phone

reflected dim-bluely in her intent eyes

before they wisely blinked— a symptom

of her strength— & showed him the photos—

the tribe-folk established in a space

of their own, women riding bikes, kids wearing

school uniforms & smiling, water tanks being

raised & wells being dug, a protest to make

their village a stop on the bus route & in that crowd

with her the people of the village, the NGO activists

her comrades in red towels & sickle-badges

do you deserve, she had said, you

who winced at the world & escaped

into fictions, you who could afford

to stay silent & have nothing change

you who have never lived in the real world

do you deserve to judge what is dead?

i have lived more, she said, changed

the world more really than the dead

white male french pedophile theorists

you keep talking about ever could

hey, he had replied, not all of them were pedos

some of them were just regular perverts

he cracked her up— the fissure was a smile

& that selfsame smile smuggled out of its

small time was now on his face as he was

leaving the house to look for her

for her eyes, a car-window, a puddle

any surface where he could reflect on

how different the shape of this smile was

than the shape she had curled into when

the moon dripped, than the shape she had

left in her hurried emptiness this morning

than the shape of his life that was a form of time.

~ ajay

10/1/2022