I come from words
the letters of all the words I have ever read
knit themselves together
with my needles
	warm in my hands
in the sun by my window

They knit themselves together tightly
no vacant space
	no air can flow between the stitches
and the blanket I weave is enough 
to cover my entire world

My reality
is black with Times New Roman
to the edge of the lake
they pour their ink into
shackled to the very heart of me
	down
		down
			down 
to its ebony recesses

The underwater caves 
with their bleached white sightless 
fish ancestors
fill me with a teeming joy
to have ever first
		read you

Perhaps the inanimate objects
in my house
do not have a fixed place in
time and space

Upon reading a textbook
in your social studies class
about pre-European
Aotearoa
you see a picture of my car-keys
lying next to the
kumara pit

Look closer
you can see my reading glasses
in the pocket of the man
in the Place de la Concorde
as he lets the guillotine
swish down
chop

Floating alongside
Buzz Aldrin
and his can of Tang
is my copy of
Fifty Shades of Grey

You can keep that one,
Buzz

Your friendship is having a rare incurable genetic disease
diminished and spent, a horde of self-congratulatory millennial hipster doctors burst into your hospital room
flecks of organic feta speckling their luxuriant beards
they announce a belated cure that has no time for you

It is finding out you are pregnant after untold cycles of IVF
blessed twins
but you live in emergency housing
your husband’s lover burnt the house down

It is finally finding accommodation
in a flat with a dear old lady
and discovering she is a Covid-denying, common-law sheriff
with her daily Zoom meetings

It is planning a delicious meal
the supermarket awash with grey empty shelves
another unexplained shipping shortage
so you have microwave rice instead

It is a car breaking down on the Desert Road
headlights sparkle and a car pulls over
“my rescuer!” you sigh
but the car just departs, trailing sad face emojis and elderflowers in its wake