Sometimes when working on something I get stuck profoundly on something that insists on being there, apparently the way it is, yet it is nonsensical, incomplete, unfinishable, unworkable. none of the words will allow to be changed and it feels like a profound wrong to delete them. for example, a poem of ten pages or so founders on the image of a couple in the courtyard of an abandoned house, embracing in suncream, in a day's intense heat. the image is glanced at in a few words which do not convey. I don't know who they are to the poem or why they are there; I have to assume they have a role but I can't see what it is, or why it is so insistent. if I expand upon them they become a kind of ur-couple who take over in a way I can't live with. If I delete them I feel lost, the poem loses its anchor and floats away from me.

the couple are indulging in an escape. they belong to a world which doesn't recognise the abandoned house; their presence is an indulgence and an intrusion - they have no permission.

And what am I doing here? with that couple that won't articulate itself. they had something to say:

caught in a crumbling courtyard, in love.

their telescope body, expanding its creamy bows

his standing is a gate, hers outlines a slipper. this is what they say to each other, but who are they? they are too mysterious