The vapours of your words rise up

The vapours of your words rise up, steam in what I read,

In every lively music, every crumbling manuscript of loss
In every hand raised in protest, every newsfeed.
Wherever I turn a page, however far I travel across.
All convoluted streets wherever they may lead
Smiling in malicious glee as their numbers close
About me in tightening circles, unwilling to concede
A single needle-point of space for anything I compose,
They bring me back again and again to that same old place
Where the puddles shimmered with the faint reflections of your face.

There are no codes that anyone can make or call their own.

Even the ones that came before and wrote what they did
The point to all their myriad points seems only to be drawn
When you finally speared your pieces, their bodies slim, heads lucid.
All the tyre-treads etched in asphalt, every cobblestone
That thuds down the steep tumbles of alleys, every ruined pyramid
Leads me back to the labyrinth of hilltops in the dawn
Back into the chequerboard fields, the fizzy paddy green grid,
Laid out like torn pages of the poems I once saw you write
The letters a bit blotched by the rain, the meanings heaving upright.