Don't be fooled: one foot on the sill, the other –

you reckon?

Wrong: first there's years to tear and flatten,

handy places where life's been stored, taped shut.

There's throwing an a and a q

and an x through the panes, in that order, the glass

of habit become floor sprinkles: look.

Next, you'll need to put your known-quantity feet in holes

that are painfully new.

And then you'll be digging

with bare fingers

through the fat mulch of things you'd so carefully

as they tend to say: forgotten.

While all this time the window prompts, invites,

forbids, doubts you.

It says: what about this tattery queue

of outstretched hands still to fill

with the (in truth) insubstantial gifts your la-la-la mind

seems to have begrudged. No more.

Soon (as a new world sea washes into your vacant

cranium; as piles of discarded indifferences

smoulder on a proliferation of fires)

you may at last lift the first foot. Slow-ly.

See: it's a brand new sky out there

ready to be inhaled, in its own time.