Nick Laird

Maybe nothing beats the nothingness.

Because we time-travel into the future

at a blistering sixty minutes an hour,

I ask you to sit down and write me

one beautiful sentence I might carry

the past I might have gone for a peace sign

or a smiley fac

had been adding and subtracting

sounds from my epic on the winds

that thread the known world,

but something like a real poem surfaced

then, in the dust,

What is it anyway to say that one thing

is like another? I practise forms of accusation.

You’d like to see me alphabetised into

my rightful places and the files archived. I’d have you used in combinations of

the adjectives and verbs and nouns I’m certain you deserve.

sorry

when I cough I cough up all this black stuff. You say it is invisible from space.

give you a bed for your tiredness: I give you

can tuck a cloud under your chin. If it’s an advert

the product is love. If it’s an element, water. If it’s

not consistent, that’s part of its charm. If it’s a bomb,

it’s a beautiful dud, and I love you, she says, this much.

see that. I like the fact

we’re ‘supercooled starmatter’, even if I can’t envisage you

as anything other than warm and bleating. The thing is