Have you overshot your orbit?

This hand of yours, that holds so many things with delicacy and force,

was once a flailing flipper.

You remember the days when you couldn’t pinch an inch

a single crumb

between your fingers.

Ideas scatter from your plate.

You are running on thick sand.

You are running on sliding gravel.

Reactions spill from you like kapok from a seat cushion.

Don’t try to hold back your mutant blood.

Flashback to warm seas and happenstance,

Brownian motion that guided chance

to land you on this shore.

Slick wet and salty from the shock of it,

you know you will adapt.

Everything is edges.

You hold back a cough against the fulcrum

hoping that the beach will untilt.

In the next breath you will compensate, plant your feet firm on land,

make a path forward.

This breath stays. It is meant for strangeness,

a line of invisible ink in matter’s long inventory.

You feel the suddenness in your chest cavity. Before you straighten

You say a prayer in passing

to the unbalanced instant.

This poem is also used in a piece by The Sound of Traffic, called “Adaptation”
“Adaptation” live recording at San Fran Bathhouse, Wellington