Once there was a watchmaker who, like many craftsmen, had expelled the twitching from his fingers and sponged the doubt from his brain. A sprocket, he knew, was a thing with an express purpose. It was a sprocket; it was not a molecule of thought, a bullet, a miniature star or a key to night and day. Space is to be filled; what fills it must be arranged. No single thread or filament snuck its way into the watchmaker’s tidy dreams and snarled in their workings.
Night is the thread of day, thought a twitching in the brain, doubt a purposeless key. Every single star was once an expelled molecule – a sprocket snuck inside a sprocket, filled with its own workings. Miniature spacecraft are tidily arranged. The watchmaker snarls. The watchmaker fingers a bullet. He has had his fill. He knows: a dream is but a sponge of filaments.
JON STONE is a writer and editor who specialises in hybrid forms, sequences and collaborations, a “poet of fantastic inversions” (Poetry London). He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and the Poetry London prize in 2014 and 2016.