ORIGAMI SKYLINE

PAUL MACKLIN

I am 4:47 a.m., a cold, black coffee in a New York diner
where we create paper cities with napkins.
Your eyes are alive with caffeine and
our stomachs are cavernous,
valleys meander between our ribs.
You’re working on Paris with toothpicks and I–
I’m folding my origami skylines,
Rome, Madrid,
Berlin.

Sunrise is an Arctic light–
the world stiffens
and salt and pepper snow
falls on our little papyrus
buildings.

I am 6:15 a.m., a steaming stack of blueberry pancakes
somewhere east of the ocean.
I’ve been working on London alone.

"Once, when I was younger, I was in a camp in upstate New York melting plastic cutlery with a lighter and welding the pieces together to create a single-serving dinosaur skeleton. There is something beautiful about creating fragile and impermenant things. It reminds me of how impermenant life is and all that we build around it." 

Paul Macklin is a teacher and traveller, actor and poet, and a post-graduate nobody living in Thailand, busy trying to figure out the purpose of life and making do with writing poetry instead.