✦ EXTRACTION → ARRIVAL ✦

just back from Washington—

heartsfiend holding us, a temporal store for our love prospect.

i’m roadside, in the slower ring—

and still the cars slap past, all urgency, all go—

even here.

✦

terminal glowing—

blue left, red right—

travel, auto, air—

one circuit, breathing.

coming and going—

jacob’s ladder:

ascending, descending—

bodies traded through light.

a 747 drops low—

immense, mythic—

something higher choosing to be here.

✦

bigx—

wake up. your wife is thirty minutes from almost.

everything collapses to that.

✦

the day began with extraction—

steel, pressure, root—

gone.

less of me.

gauze. motrin. receipt for pain.

have a nice day.

✦

now—

i’m empty, idling, waiting for something to arrive that isn’t loss.

tongue checks the absence.

the body knows.

✦

glass dance—

thumbs, targets, charge, impact—

can you hear me now.

plane landed. taxiing. almost. forty-five minutes, honey.

love, translated into signal.

✦

this place stores moments it never keeps—

names it never learns—

and still, it cradles this:

our almost.

✦

i hope she’s ok—

not too tired, not too undone—

but it won’t matter.

i’m not waiting for presentation.

i’m waiting for her.

✦

all night—

transfer. handoff. reposition.

removed from one place—

set down in another.

✦

and me—

extracted. emptied. ready.

hazards blinking under descending planes.

the system moves—

and what matters moves with it.

✦

soon—

all this collapses:

one car. one curb. one face.

affection—

inbound.