Dan and Dina Elbow

ODD FUTURE

Your arms must be her arms

The body you stole into, clattering down

Always wearing an expression of completion 

A kind of wearing down

The instrument, which was to become its tool

And now you're ready, saying, yet shouldn't it quite be

Only just ready, the sound of it, clattering down

Really breaking down, like had you been honest

Like everything would've sounded different

What you were saying it was in the beginning

When it was winter and snowing insanely

Like what great lives you would lead together

In the wind, in the snow, stopping, starting, at this point

Here, all the past is different

But without having really changed, as though one had been living

All this time in a blue house only to randomly call it yellow

One day, because you just feel like it's all of a sudden

It's yellow. And maybe it is yellow. And something else, except these

These are things that prefer to be called among ones who had been there

In the old way, and it's no use ignoring that the old can't tolerate

The new way. It accepts the contemporary

Providing it home with its unlimiting context. But here we are

As if all this hasn't been a hundred years in coming

And so makes your face an expression of wanting

That which couldn't have been and is now coming true

Is finally wanting who you are now

That snow is covering her face with a question

You, who sits with a sly grin

Brimming with old misdeeds? near an open window in Prague?

In Brussels?

Dusseldorf?

That the things that had happened previously, to unknown people,

Found new people, through the long process of error and retaliation

And happened again. It takes a long time to say

Anything given that your time has been an exercise

In this confusion, having been made a stranger of yourself

And so you seek refuge

In that deadness that feels like

In full armor. The springs are stranded along tubers

And what other flowers, what other mountains and sledding

--and this will change your life now?

Or what life you had led approached this error, this cruelty?

There were living people? almost able to speak?

And her arms are cold, as a sky going by the window

In a curve, will seem cold?