by another route

leaving my city like sewing in a wide loop—catching the cloth's edge and crumpling it, instead of inching forward across the surface with deliberate and reinforcedly tiny stitches.

this road i know so well and have traveled, now, unevenly in direction and number, in paid attention and time of day. in doing so a few scant days ago, i never returned. in thinking (wrongly) that i could—from any direction and at any time—and in counting on this fact, however, neither did i leave when last i went. how, then, now, can i do anything but, merely, move? another west-ward trip will not make up for the missed one, will not let me leave. but the east-ward one would not have brought me back where the train from the north-east has failed.

here is the trip, and it alone cannot be tempered. i need neither more time nor less, for it has come to this: if i do not catch the trailing letters of dusky details from this window, there will be no chance to collect the missing pieces, to file them in the appropriate gaps. it is only because it will not be followed that this journey forms a perfect present: with past and future wholly unfurled, unshakably impotent. as such, it eludes reconciliation and will not be so easily pointed to the way in which, though there are seams, these have been staggered and thatched, leaving nothing uncovered.