This poem defines itself in one word—the first word!

‘Indefinite’. Here, it fixes the nature of what is coming up—indefinite in language, time, space, even as to author and audience. It gives a certainty that underpins the rest of the piece, that you can be sure you cannot be sure of anything in this poem.

Indefinite. The first tercet indicates we are not going somewhere, but to poorly defined somewheres. At a speed disrupted from the norm. And not just the ‘we’ of ‘our’ but the ‘Velleity’ of ‘yours’—or does ‘yours’ implicate the poem, self-aware in the second tercet, itself? Indentations offer centres of gravity, excavated spaces for thinking, ‘sun-alcoves’ from which we can stare out at the surrounding lines—‘overlooking outside’. That is just one destination.

Indefinite. The language here shimmers with uncertainty. The act of concatenation produces uncertainty. ‘Indefinite destinations’ are so different to ‘In definite destinations’, yet reads almost indistinguishably when recited in slow motion. There are others: ‘after noon’, ‘con dolences’. There are concatenations using hyphenation: ‘slow-motion’, ‘sun-alcove’, ‘park-like’ in the first stanza alone. Concatenations of a poem trying to connect—no, define—uncertain words in relation to perception. And just as the reader becomes used to this trick comes the enjambment across the stanza break of ‘a late afternoon // will soon sit with her’, or the inversion ‘for you can do’ to unsettle us.

Indefinite. ‘Reading of words’? ‘shhhhh…’ with multiple ‘h’s and the ellipsis… sound, but not word. How about ‘0800 929 929’? Is this words or numbers? ‘Oh Eight Oh Oh Nine Two Nine Nine Two Nine’, or perhaps ‘Oh Eight Hundred…’ or do we replace ‘Oh’ with ‘Zero’ or ‘Nought? So not well defined! And is the repetition of ‘9’ and ‘929’ indicative of some numerical poetry? To steal a quote ‘we all need to play’.

Indefinite. Not even nothing is completely defined in this poem. ‘half-dressed… // she is an audience / to her own light’. It seems everything is shared 50-50 by the end: ‘gender fluid’, ‘half-hour’, ‘half-dressed’, ‘half-smile’, ‘half-wait’. Are we, each an audience, the poem writing our own meanings here? The boundary seems so undefined—a darkness of uncertainty waiting for a doleful dawn when the sun will carve out definition illumination but also by casting shadow.

Indefinite. Even the subject matter is indefinite. We do not know Velleity, her age, how she occupies space, how she occupies herself. But we half-know her—‘she’ is in the poem, questioning, meditative, self-aware. She seems young given the future gaze of that opaque first stanza, but she could well be aged and in her ‘late afternoon’. Her ‘own abundance’ could be yet to be made real, but could have already been realised.

This is the poem as liminality of language, time and space, a future elegy, knowing in generality but not in detail. We poets, we record the past in words for the future… and every word carries a weight and a playfulness, a definition and an ambiguity. Words—creatures of the not-quite-t/here. I suspect Velleity will have to learn to cope with them, play with them, juggle them. Just like this poem.