I
The projector will not cease. I am alone
in the theatre of this skin, seat creaking,
watching the reel of hands that were mine
go blue at stiff joints, the film warping,
frame skip, frames skipping, the flesh
performing its slow long dying in close-up,
while the child in me hammers on the screen,
mouths let me out to the vacant aisles,
and on and on it goes with no the credits,
no house lights, just the dark, just the shadow
watching itself in starlight vanish.

II
Every mirror jumps at me now,
so I have barricaded every door of
this house against the one holding the knife.
Behind the weeping window the face a girl
still watches, thirty-something,
holding her tender breath,
waiting for the cut to daylight, to sirens,
for the hand that hauls her out.
The camera does not cut.
It only pushes in, further in.

III
I raise the phone to an ear but there is only
my breath on the line, wet, close, echoing.
The intruder who has been in my room for years
comes down wearing my cold blue hands
and the sculpture that is the ill-fitting
latex of my throat, and the person I used to
be is still shouting, don’t go in there!
at someone already in the room, already there,
one who cannot hear the final warning
because she is the room, the stairs, the cloudy ink
pooled at the top of it. Rewind the spool.
There was never a cut where I get out.

 

28/8/2026