Crumbling Grey

there is a small measure of us
less concrete than memory,
a truth and certainty
embedded in the nerve
we've passed down through time
a re-living and remembering
of such similar sensations and deaths,
in the quiet of a cold
like the one outside

in momentary bursts
and exchanges, we live
in the exact same way
that fire forgets
where it has been,
forgets, not just the meal, but
that it even sat down to eat, unmasked
teeth-first before us

while its fullness
moved and called like life,
all steam, smoke and chemical change,
its future moved
more like my present,
wrapped in past and ash,
broken by the blunt force
of its own bite

this is why i find home
in a death like mine
and the home it's found
in your eyes,
in the cool gradients of sky above
and the fading resonance
of life's bricks, crumbling grey
into the sand, washed up
between our toes

and as we step deeper
into the lifeless wash
of this seascape and photograph,
i hear the air above, alive
passing through, catching edges
whistling our hollow-boned histories aloft,
as the dead above, circle
us dead below,
in a slowly descending spiral,
a grey blur of smoke and gull wings