The Poet on tickle is contact minus prediction

Reach for your own ribs and the body meets you halfway, already there, already tired of the touch it sent. This is the oldest marriage: contact arriving pre-forgiven. Nothing left to feel but weight.

A stranger’s hand — same five fingers, same pressure — and the skin leaps, because no one sent word ahead. The leap was never in the hand. The leap is the distance the hand outran.

What you have been calling your temperament may be a touch nobody let you name: a door that shut before you learned it opened, so the draft became your weather. I startle easily. No — something once walked in, and the record was scrubbed, and the walking never stopped. It has your address now. It has no name for the room.

The terrace does not tickle the foot that laid it. Then a stone gives, one step, and for that step you are a guest on your own ground. Micro-exile. Then the mortar of habit seals it, and you are home again, and blind again. Leave one stone loose on purpose.

Every mercy comes in two colors. One keeps the scar lit, so the map stays honest — here is where the world came through. The other glazes the wound, swears the wall unbroken, and the wound, evicted, goes wandering for a body that will let it in.

Iron is the ceiling of any patient fire. Gold asks the dying — the flare that floods every gauge at once, the one night a single star out-shouts its whole sky. No steady burn arrives at that heat.

So when the last prediction fails, when nothing you forecast will hold its shape, be slow to name it ruin. Some of what scatters, cooling in the dark, is heavier than anything you meant to keep, and settles, later, as the soil some gentler system mistakes for solid ground.

Go find the place you still flinch. That is the one unpaved acre left in you. Build nothing there. Not yet.