i discovered deathlessness in a white house 

which had clasped blue windows to its chest 

they never spoke, the windows 

always gaped at the skies where it never rained 

prayers or curses, all the same.

sometimes when the sun would come through 

the white wall of that white, white house 

i would watch it fall and split and spread on the floor, unconscious, 

and think of time that once leapt out of the watch 

of a young boy killed, his bone 

which had clasped to its chest 

the blue watch like the blue windows 

and the wailing father discovered that time

too splits and spreads and continues to scuttle 

along its own irreedemable edges, the father 

only the dead boy and the dead watch 

like the water so thirsty that it folds and forms over itself 

to become a wave and then falls flat on its face, injured.

waking up, when light was only two black roads 

and seven circles of orange crossed by yellow, 

i would rub my eyes and see 

a lady drying her hennah which like the thirsty water wave never dried, only her heart

shrivelled, like a raisin, waiting. 

and wasting 

would walk another man, pacing regularly, restlessly the rooms 

where the wound was always being born, the midwife neatly cutting the umbilical cord between
meaning and memory. 

death did not exist in the white house with blue windows 

only some waves which were brought to the shore 

only to recede and perform salt gargles 

for an illness that persisted, like hearts of boats persist

in the dying, defeaning sea. 

you see, deathlessness is not immortality —

that curse is for the gods, for us only the hungry eyes 

that prey upon the thinning air —  

it is becoming the hennah on her hands, the watch on his hands

and waiting for the midwife to emerge from the left room on the top 

to neatly cut the umbilical cord between meaning and memory.