To a pencil

Past midnight, last day of the summer
the shore unraveled in gentle echoes
under the half-mooned sky
as campfires throbbed
like amorous young hearts in longing.

Eager to untangle my sandy numbness
I scrambled some wood and stole some fire,
fervidly dreaming of poetry
("Past midnight, last day of the summer...")
only to realise that it was no longer mine.
The evening must have swallowed it
somewhere along the way.

Waves hummed at strangers, stars squabbled
and fires crackled till dawn
but the night never recovered,
silenced by the clumsiness of fate.

Morning arrived
and another eventually took its place,
younger, shinier, crisper.
(It even came armed for exigencies,
an eraser for errors.)

Together we travelled far and wide
crumbling streets and solitudes into words,
conjuring and consuming existences
but every line scribbled since
has been like a tune played in the wrong hand,
a vague exertion in recalling
something that can never be recalled.

Poetry had forked that night, irrevocably,
and with it had vanished an unbegotten future,
a campfire's porous whispers
and the unclaimed desires of a lovelorn summer.

Between every thought and its word
lies a fleeting destiny, a forever carved of wood.
Mine frays on an Iberian shore,
an exile warped in an unfinished summer,
befriending a sand crab, perhaps.