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See you in bunny ears
See you exhausted

Where have you been?
Imagining the snipped hole in the fence
which you must have gone through
with wirecutters pinched from a nearby allotment

Did you climb a steep embankment?
Feel the fallout of a passing ghost train
on the other side?

See you exhaling
See you glass-marble-eyed

Imagining you as the patron saint of:

Holding Open Doors
Brief Disappearances
Troubleshooting, Illumination
The Wakeful
City Babies

and Survival

You’ve got the measure of yourself, I think
Your shirtlessness is deliberate

What are you holding out of shot?

Imagining worker’s hands
Imagining post-pillow-fight
A sort of sorrow

See you half-captured
Wholehearted half-snarling
Mona with a rifle, or something equally risky

Am I exaggerating?

That bare backdrop hides nothing
and suggests so much
in a similar way to your eyes
and skin

Imagining whose lens you’re looking into
Whether they have seen
what I am seeing, Bunny-god

Are they just guessing?

See you performing just for one
See you attending an alternative event
with marker pens and paints
clutched, Striding

Making it look easy
A sort of ballet

It’s not recital, not routine

And I can’t tell if you know that
you were made in one whole piece
of inadvertent magic

How wild do you feel?
Keenness heightened by a terror
in the belly
Keen as a blade
in a quivering hand

See you not running, still

See you with a shining look
and extents that I might build a shrine to
I might build a shrine of the things
you make me think
and decorate it with too many words

The tragedy of he who creates magic
is that he does not get to witness it
– May I offer this inscription?

You don’t need it

I am watching from behind the cover
of the future you couldn’t see
what I am building

It is flowers blown up around
a windproof monument

Imagining you withstanding things

(Things standing about your feet:

Coins
Trinkets
Candles

See you surrounded
See your hundreds of little flickerings

Imagining what rites you have invented
for yourself
What atonements?)

But you can only do everything
until you can’t

Hey Longshadow
Hey Magnitude-Eyes
Hey Funny-Bunny-Guy

Hey thing about to pop

Please help me to help you

My unusual religion
My performance artist

Somehow, from the wherever-you-are

See you regardless
Faraway Clown

In one way or another

Imagining
Imagining

Hey Timeless Universe
Hey Beginning-of-Things

See you standing there
See you looking at me
Imagining your mouth opening to speak

Tell me a story?

 

Lizzy Turner is a poet and a barista. Her work has appeared in various publications online and in print. She hosts the podcast series a poem a week.