Tell Me Exactly Where You Are

“Tell me exactly
Where you are!”
Yelled the man
Down the phone
To someone else
Standing alone

In a place, in a space,
He’s speaking
To an unseen face
With a conviction
That he will placate
Whoever it is,
Once he can locate them.

I am standing exactly
On Ponsonby road
On spat gum, on melted load
Of tarmac and shingle.

Unseen to the man, I mingle
On the crusted street
Below which clay and rock
And molten core meet.

I am not exactly here.
I am near to the man
With his ear to the phone
And his mouth a drone

But I’m only approximately near
I am more to the rear
Of what is considered the real.
The belief in the feel
Of substance on top of substance

Rather than the trance
That was replaced by a glance
At the extortion of exactitude,
Latitude and longitude
By the man on the phone,
Alone.

He wouldn’t have found me here.
He couldn’t have known precisely where.
To find my seeping ether.
I couldn’t have found me either

Because I wasn’t exactly there
Barely even aware
Of my physical walk
Towards a projection
That could talk
Into a case
And demand
The fettered physicality
Of someone else’s place

The eye of my face
Had a place in my skull
But the ‘I’ of my mind
Was adrift in a lull
And I could barely feel

The neutronic nest
Of my mind’s creature
Hidden safely,
Behind bone and feature.

The ‘I’ of me was a spatial reader
Containing no matter
And requiring none either.
My body just a portal
located in a place
Supporting the vertical
Physical trace

Of a head on a neck
With holes now attuned
To the seep of another,
The osmosis of the crude.

Demander of exactness,
Of feet nailed to the ground

And of that someone,
Somewhere,
Who must wait
To be impossibly
Exactly found