“The cup is always already broken.”

Small and delicate, a pleasure to handle, to pick up, to hold,

for years, it has delivered the day’s warm assuagements.

I do struggle to accept that its splendour, like our own, must inevitably shatter.

I prefer to dream of perfect care and unassailable security forever and ever;

to ignore the astonishing chasm I’m standing at the edge of;

to overlook that there is no edge and that I’ve already fallen in,

that the cup and I are indistinguishable from the fall,

that we have no words, no hope, no fear, but subside 

— have, perhaps, already subsided.