before the world can take a breath, you move:
                                           you, the simple colors of your body
                                                                 hurtling masterless through light
                                                                           and circumstance: you, a molecular
                                                                                    miracle, lightning sewn along your angles:
                                                                           you, chin raised, limbs blurred, thinking
                                                                 not of motion but of home—a kitchen
                                           table, cicadas, an open window. when you were young,
           was it freedom that you wanted, or a place
to lie down and be still?

how do you expect anyone to look?
to watch you, to allow you—you: a blur, a myth,
a prey animal, always fleeing, always leaving-behind.
you’ve done it a hundred times. sometimes you sink
into a starting pose, sometimes you don’t. either way,
you’re smudged out of existence, at your leisure.
arms no longer arms, legs no longer legs, pulse no longer measured
by movement but by appetite, recklessly insisting
on itself. impossible to catch, more impossible still
to name—although i tried. we both know i tried.

this is not a joke, although you treat it like it is.
that is how you manage, isn’t it? invert every catastrophe,
until it is something with ten syllables and a punchline.this, too, is running.

what impels you, none of us can say. whether it is a running
towards or away, we can never know. we can only be grateful
that when the time comes to stop, when there is no more road,

you stop.

i get it now. long ago, the dinosaurs
craned their necks and saw a streak
of violent light, bearing down
on their great bodies, and they froze.
but i’m no dinosaur, and this
no cretaceous lakeside. just a bank vault,
and an empty gun, and me
craning my neck, dumb
in the face of your velocity.

ever since the accident, your body
handles different. it’s like your bicycle
in the third grade, clipped by a produce truck:
somewhere, unseen, a crooked spoke,
its error ticking softly with each movement,
reminding you of coach’s stopwatch.
anyway, the body is the bank of life,
and moments its currency. if you had to count up
all the life in this body, this crooked inert body
reflected in the glass, you would see
between the scars and fraying muscles,
the bruises and false starts, a pittance. you would see
a creature cursed to wait, out of step with everything
that matters. voices move like steel ships, grinding
words out against slow water. sensations end
before your body can name them: touch, want, hunger.
always the hunger. you lift your hand
up to the bathroom mirror, mark your heart
with your own thumb, and think: there is only
so much time, so many trembling hours,
and we’ve got to hurry up, we’ve got to,
use it all, use every second, til it’s gone—
or it will all be over, and this, too,
will have been an accident.

your afterimage haunts the skyline like a bruise,
rupturing the vessels of existence underneath
the thin membrane of summer.if there was a threat, it’s gone.
you’ve carried it someplace no one can follow,
where it’s just the two of you: you and danger,

locking eyes at time’s tessellating rim, where you
crack a smile, wipe the blood from your split lip,
and tell danger that if it wants us, it’ll have to race you back

and you both know who’ll win.