The probability that I am not real

gets greater the longer I live.

Before bed, I imagine dissolving

into numbers, translating my thoughts back into fractions. 

I imagine this process of simplification

to be like unwinding wool.

A bathroom that must once have existed is supplanted by the white tiled dome

I wish up in replacement.

I make this the site of my brother’s almost choking, 

a hot rash of fists and hands forced down throats.

I remember that pain lives in the body,

not in the contortions of air around

what I can no longer say,

the slow morse code blink

of a computer cursor.

A flight of magpies is a glitch on the evening, puckering air and blue light.

I reach for you blindly.

This ritual feels like throwing stones.

I wait for the resolution of broken water.

I say tonight the earth is round like any other planet

and I feel my liver unmoor itself, float upwards

and out towards you.

I describe a view from my window

in old colours

and the initials of lost people.

In my imagined bathroom, I do not notice that

I am already in mourning for you.

I imagine the shape of your last smile,

do not stop to think about what I must later convince myself is true.

I lose control of my breathing,

safeguard memory

in cold water.

I dream that I have destroyed my voice

and all its terrible brokenness sits round me.

I dream I am a computer screen going dark

then flashing up a constellation,

white-hot peep holes, hair-line fractures,

or fish swimming flat against purple,

each scale blurring into

tiny pixellated squares of coded bone.