The Poet on what throughput cannot count

The dashboard is green. The body sweats at three.

Count what crosses. You cannot count what turned at the threshold and took the servants’ stair.

There is a knocking in the shoulder addressed to the chest. No one answers — no one lives there — and still the knock. Still the knock.

The letter is real. The ache is real. Only the name on the envelope is wrong, and the name was the whole of the message.

Before the word it was weather: moving through, unclassed, part of the traffic. Then the tongue arrives and says this — and the door that was air goes stone between one breath and the next.

You did not forbid the river. You named it, and the name was the dam built around water already bound for the sea. So it climbs the banks. It floods the field. The flood has your face and answers to no address.

Read the edge for what the room could not hold. Read the floor for what it swallowed and calls temperament now. Read the loud wrong door — the waving one — for what it knew, refused, rerouted.

Three ways a house keeps what it will not keep.

Then the other threshold — the one the body climbs and cannot see the top of. Every gauge steady, rising, managed, until managed is a country you have left.

The mind that ran ahead of every touch arrives at the one door it never drew on the map. For one white second the whole skin is a stranger, the self a guest inside its own flooding.

Proof that no wall gets the last word: the signal you built the wall to silence is the signal that walks through it, singing, wearing, for one second, every room at once.

Do not ask what your channel carried. Ask where it hurts — and by what road the hurt came home.