What if I took everything back, all the volcanoes, the ash, the stones, and the roses coaxed from coal.

What if I never listened to the dark, where the damp becomes a body of voices reaching outwards, where the ghosts tease stitches open, where hands are tied and pleas are crushed into stars.

What if children were houses; would their doors be always open, would we fill them with broken furniture and dust, would we tear down their walls and scour their spirits clean with steel brushes?

What if I could travel every bullet; through chipped bone, into the entropy of trust in a pierced kidney, into the heart, a clock ticking into both my hands.

What if every word was loaded and there was no safety-catch; shells gathering like needles in a whore’s alley, like litter pooling in the gutters, exit wounds like shredded paper.

What if I give everything away while I’m sleeping, let the pages drift across wet pavement reflecting weak lamplight, let the seeds of everything slip away into the wild where small hands furrow and build where I can never go.

What if?