Lighthouses

We are all cast
on rocks
strewn out across an open sea.

We stand, wide-
bleary-eyed, blinded by our neighbour's headlights
at the tip of some horizon
that is not the end of the world,
just the end of the only world that we can see.

We glare with one determined ray of light along each-other's lines of latitude:
note how the waves are weathering all our feet.

We erode elegantly,
two chins to the wind;
we try to wipe the lichen from our knees.

I would stick my fingers around any old equator if I could
stop turning,
if my eyes were not bigger than this steady beam.

Curse this bulb,
filthy filament,
shining farther than I could ever hope to reach;
as it dims the world is shrinking. Everything
will get smaller and come to me.

I want your photons touching mine.

The same ships are passing every night.









June 2009.