Quotes from Alice Oswald

one of the many mass-produced particles of time

and their hearts are already eroded and I too

the same dizziness the same life like a metal beam whacks me on the head again as when a man slinks home after battle alive alive and nobody else was that lucky who is it trapped in this living shape pushing the door with his hands still covered in blood

if you think I care about your soft-spoken head-in-the-clouds seizure of another and yet another and yet another hour

with the same old grief as mine is it mine am I home oh how much life not my own have I buttered and eaten

there comes a tremor and there comes a pause

you are so bodiless, so barely there

it is always midnight in those pools

it's a pitiable likeness of clear running struggling to keep up with what's already gone

the same old choirs of hours

as soon as the grief as soon as a ghost begins to shake me from the inside

I always speak to myself no more myself but a colander draining the sound from this never-to-be-mentioned wound

a kiss gives off a swoosh of amnesia

I notice the fatigue of flowers weighed down by light

beautiful disused route to the sea fish path with nearly no fish in

as if dropped from a great height falling

why don't they lift their weight and see what's flattened underneath it?

and half-formed faces float out and vanish too undulating to be actual

bewildered were the dead going about their days and nights in the dark putting their feet down carefully and finding themselves floating

which is a memory which happens again and again

into the lane he dropped not once looking up

the makeshift character that springs from speaking and looking on and letting everything pass and then the loneliness of being left here endless lost to my lethargy like a dripping tap

what a block of hope what a kleptomaniac what a thief of life I am

and the whole apparition only ever known backwards already too late now almost gone