A world away and howling wind and snow befit the dreary day when strike so swift the daylights thinned to tear me from your shining ray.

Foam from fissures flies freer when pushed upward by sulphorous steam. Steam cannot be shackled, cannot be seen nor held - it sears worse than red-hot iron brands one marked "dreamer", another "loser", another "winner". Where these brands would burn your label plainly, steam would indiscriminately boil your face off until all that is left is a window to your bare thoughts.

Remember when we fought past that mud in the pitch black set camp, absorbed fire heat into each other's flickering faces slept in parallel and woke to a new, foreign, sunlit world? Remember when we explored the old church graveyard the decaying lichen-painted stones bending toward the hill erosion threatening to bare forgotten bones? Remember wondering if archaeologists, uncovering an eternally sleeping couple could confuse his tibia for hers, her femur for his?

When a dark grey dawn grows to a deep gold morning and the speed-blurred trees begin to inhale their twelve hours of sunshine and a solitary bus traces a ribbon of concrete through a vast, uniform wilderness and the solitary passenger isn't where he's going, nor where he's been, but rather some dark grey region between them; and the whole world feels like it's in some sort of impenetrable stasis as if the bus is caught in an infinite loop neverending wheels neverending road: The passenger fee...

An afternoon parking-lot setting sunshine and springtime air permeate unmoving cars waxed atypical blossomed leaves marionetting Deep in the fathoms of slumber, each of the cars a goliath dreaming of pavement and petrol without a load to encumber

I will shred your doubt scatter its black ivy coils that, free, you may dance. I will subsume your subconscious mind, that you may hear me in your sleep. I will cut anchors from your bound appendages that your wings may spread. I will place you on rivers, that surface tension carry you softly. You will build a fire in my eyes, that I may see your burning halo.

You're a pond lily covered in volcanic ash refusing to sink.

Be a drop of rain - among the storm, you are lost. You are felt alone.

A lone albatross, I sift through the drifting semaphore cloud breaths that you cast, vaporous seeds, into my soundless skyscape. Below, waterways trace diagrams of your organs - tarry lymphatic systems, winding intestines, floodplain lungs. I dream of engineering the circumvention of your many false positives. I dream of abandoning the search for your fading contrails. I dream of assuming the dew-wet grass blades that advise your nude ankles.

I've ever harboured this toy compulsion to eat a popsicle, and then, lips unnaturally coloured, freezing to near numbness, slick with artificial flavour, kiss.