The Proportion of Broken

     When time is broke and no proportion kept!
       —Shakespeare

Relentless, I love relentless: relentless
doors and windows unhinged with their ways to open.
Thinking that cannot stop or
that bee-hurry, honey-havoc hive.
Some simple cogs and wheels;
something is always on.
Live sea that cannot stop
breathing, dog chasing its scrap tail, red bird
at the wind, always one flying
from the sky's china arms. Chatter, ants, television.
I know no place like it. Relentless Earth
and no other way out. Incoherent
as seed and as close to the ground. Someone will come
to dig there with relentless tenderness.
Flowers, in their relentless kept beauty, will wait.
There, disembodied as doubt,
the fog will double in, even try to convince
itself indebted blind, of its own way.
To outdo any word of mouth or maintenance of mind
the dream keeps relentless time.
Dreams keep relentless white air for you to breathe
and without any hope
of departure, they keep the love that will strike its blue match
over and against your heart without bearing broken
from one world to the next. I sleep
out of this inconsolable chaos,
without a roof where there is no proportion
kept, until troubling the abrupt reeled-in hour,
I alone might appear as a matter of fiction
for this relentless will to forever have and have
me again, till it has me, to hold.

Copyright © 2002 Elena Karina Byrne All rights reserved
from The Flammable Bird
Zoo Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission