The morning starts with the sun, pulling these words along with it. Then the morning begins again with an egg. Large and round and yolky at the centre of its own universe. Spitting golden comets of oil. Cracking open dawn and slowly sighing itself out into the day. Sunlight streams into the kitchen window and spills itself onto the vortex of a rounded, black pan. The yellow pours onto drops of jam which lie like volcanic jelly on the edge of the table. Sunlight rolls onto the splatters of egg white, and starts to spotlight a marching band of ants. They enter through the gaps and cracks of the kitchen countertop. Diverting, it seems, into smaller and smaller pieces. Scurrying across the chopping board and running, unseen, into hidden corners. Cushioned between the teeth of the table's wooden indents. The trafficked stream of ants continue to follow their own line, as I follow mine. Weaving in and out of the obstacles shifting in front, some split off to marvel briefly before the crossroads of cutlery. I am about to place a beginning when one ant saunters astray, crossing the periphery, and curves round the kitchen’s laminate. The lost silence sniffs around and waits for another beginning. Looking, before it moves on, to invite you in and continue to search for this beginning. To continue a start— with the pausing of an ant and the frying of an egg. Looking in, through the window, at the poised yolk of a morning.

Now the breakfast bowls are spinning and getting heavier in my hand. I am mixing seeds and grating tomatoes and trying to find flavour. The egg continues to fry until it becomes a tedious action of sizzling and spitting. Ants are left to the open cupboards, performing some sort of theatrical performance, but finding an emptiness to the packages and alcoves. I remember I forgot my recipe book, or my marker, or my mortar. I remember I forgot these things and lost my metaphor with the entire plot of it all. Maybe the morning is not so glorious after all. I slip a crumb of cake into my mouth and chew until my breath is almost perfect. Almost runny. Light like lips opening themselves up to be brought back to the same close. The whole kitchen starts to breathe as the cooking begins again. My words weave themselves, like streams of ants, into the pockets of air which I cannot see. Into the openings and closings of space to pass without sound. Light wings of a butterfly off the rising sourdough. Hands folding into a dove’s white wings, gently pressing onto a rolling pin. The ants have now almost disappeared entirely from the table. Nothing stays for longer than this moment.

It took so long to even consider making any of this, food or thoughts, or food for thoughts. To distinguish some sort of taste before all of it is forgotten, and it disappears inside the general waste. I’d like to get the start of things right before any of my language stabilises itself into a solid entity, so I cross the gaps of the white tiled floor and head towards the fridge. There was a brief moment when I wished to live like a comfortable doll inside here. To see the wounded ginger draw hairs around itself as an attempt to heal scabs. To hear how the lemon shrivels itself overnight, tucked tight into a foetal posture, both licking at its own acidity and stitching the cuts of its skin back together. The dull, buzzing light illuminated the back of the shelf, where strawberries lie wrapped in plastic, forgetting their own fields. They grow shorter and softer. The clenched kisses of a zip locked packet embedding its dates lies to the other side. I would like to be small like all of these things, and run along rubber bands, marvelling at the transparency of its showcased displays. And if I were very small, I would have so much of so little. I’d spend hours or days scratching away at some pips, or reclining on the curved smile of a squashed almond at the bottom. There will be layers and whole worlds. It is this doll house in which the ants play that I place you inside.

The kitchen’s cosmos continues its slow dance of creation, for the ants and the egg and us. The morning spirals into more noise, more metaphor, more language exploding off into different stories for another bowl to hold. To be filled with small crumbs of life which feed this story, with the tops of garlic and red shreds of tomato skin. It is as though there are crumbs entering into the pots where I am trying to begin. I pause again to ask what it is that I cannot hear. What I cannot see. What is it that I am missing to begin this story? The moss through the cracks of the earth in the garden outside. Incense burning itself— giving its body and abandoning linear composure. The scent which teases liberation with some billowing breath. Which sacrifices itself to spirals and turns each second into a fresh death. Into air and ash— the possible substance of beginnings weighs down on each of these words. Trying to find something fixed in this cream coloured kitchen. Something from which I can tell you where to start.

Then the ants on the table return. Or perhaps they were there before, except this time I order them into a line. I give them some character, like this confident, assertive joy, as if they were the twinkles of constellations as the night closes in (and you see one, then another, then another). Or they are kings arriving and taking the wealth of what they want. They never seem to reach an absolute consumption of it. Only flitter in constantly to carry crumbs. I want you to see them feasting on forgotten waste. Or maybe they are none of these things, just ants on the kitchen table. Then, they are fed up with being regal monarchs. Then, beating into the rising rays of a midday sun, I watch them march away. Again.

I want you to see how the pan holds this waiting in its boiling water. To see the same wait which you hold on the page (the same I hold in my tentative fingers). I sit here watching until my eggs boil or pausing until my washing is done. Nothing much will depend on how, or if, the yolk decides to escape from itself and fall onto the flame, or if clothes crumple when caught in the sun. But I watch tenderly anyway. As if they were my own children playing in the back garden, absent minded of my affection. There are melodies here as the breakfast continues to be prepared. As breakfast is created through these words then folds back into itself like a stack of laundry. Breakfast gives birth to all this movement and breath and prayer. This syntax strings to the start of the washing line and the end of the egg white. I get up to check on their becoming, and in doing so, find a bit of mine. One unshelled, the other cracked and white, both are ready to dance. The salted stars come out. Then the ants. Then the eggs. And it is kind of you to listen to this soft thread of song. To join in, even, with the chimes of your own life. I wonder how much I will create, or how much you will consume. I wonder how this will move through you, and if the body’s bowel will notice, too, that something has entered and another thing will leave. That the blanket of the sun across the sky will move into night. But not yet. The song is not yet over.

It is now somewhere closer to midday, though I suppose that doesn't matter much at all. Maybe the flame will be stronger under the sun at noon, and that will be where the story begins. Maybe I will still be here, watching ants fill hunger by moving through the kitchen, filling themselves with life. They continue to crawl as I write them into wriggling words. I ignore everything that is not this steady stream of moving life, and find the smallness of everything is bundled in, too. As I spread the table with sticky strawberry jam, the ants seem to fill any empty space as an intrinsic priority. Allowing myself to recall this ant, that ant, and then the next one, I invite, once again, the noise of traffic. It creeps in everywhere, even into this egg (which has now moved well on from its beginning). Somewhere in the yolk there is the vibration from rubber wheels outside that runs on without a stop. They bounce through the rubber bands in the fridge and we notice how there is no end point to this— I suppose it just runs on, long past morning.

It is then, under the steel pedal bin lying with its mouth open, that I notice an apple core. And this becomes my everything. And the story becomes so full of them— of everythings. I fold myself softly around them (like an arching piece of plasticine, enjoying becoming through its transitioning into something else). An eaten away core seems much more of an everything than any slab of jam. More unnoticed, and so, more mine. More ready to become something else. I think I want it more than those ants want jam. This is what the letters seem to spell out, before they scatter and shoot off into the day’s different directions. They spell out want as only a letter away from ant. I want to watch what nobody else wants. That ant. And the light around the breakfast by the window getting bigger, swirling itself around the kitchen like mouthwash. I am eating the skin of some other fruit, which doesn’t fit easily in my mouth without a few bites, and think it could be at the centre, and that I am the world and the word is just one big gaping, greedy mouth. I cannot consume any of this completely, and pass some lingering life ready to oxidise in the peels or seeds or dead breath I breathe, onto you. So much of what I thought to be an empty space of gaps. Though I cannot eat it all, I pick at the crumbs of a croissant. Perhaps I shall feed the world as spilt oats on the countertop feed ants.

It is in the kitchen, I conjure up all these layered sounds and scenes and memories. I am sure that you are too. But I remembered the last time you came over to eat with me. When you opened the draw and asked, “oranges? What oranges?”. I told you what poets said about oranges, and you seemed (at that moment beyond the granite island) too far away to listen. I almost paused to begin again. The story seemed to show itself in the opening and closing of my mouth. Through these round, and almost golden, globes of light. They were fat and plump and ripe. Ready for the sun. The saliva of the tongue. For that moment, just the word oranges took over so much space that it was difficult to see over it. Impenetrable until you peeled into it. Afterwards, it proved difficult to fill ourselves up with anything. The plastic bags lay open and empty, with their own mouths to feed again. I’m sure the bowls lined up in the same way too, ready to be used another time. Each one of us open to gaping and waiting. Each one of us held like orange orbs ripening in this kitchen. Paused in an amber segment of its own, the sun glazing the room into a sticky golden. I must pause at the stoplight, to see this story going in its own space. Sometimes, I must pause like a poem, and forget where it is all going. And still, in this stillness, there is no complete stop. No whole red. An ant stuck in amber. At the rounded orange lights. Between the tiles and behind the hob, I am throwing words like wasps and memories into resin. I am hoping that something will catch and crystallise. Hoping that a beginning will fossilise and chase away the elusive origins of everything around me. Of these oranges, ants and eggs.

The hob was also waiting for its turn. For now, it is still silent and unlit, glinting with starry stains around the corners. This, too, has its story to tell. For a second, every bit of the leftovers stretching over the cooker seem glorious. Bubbling cheese on the verge of being burnt. Wanting so desperately to tip over the edge, and emerge into air. A dish like that spews with so much of everything, throwing itself overboard, into indistinguishable marks. It could have been stripped chicken, pepper or tumeric. Now free to take the form of a distorted ballerina. I watch an ant tell its friends that this breadcrumb is very, very big. That in this kitchen of islands and whole universes, I too, am an ant. All this chopping and eating and breathing. All this moving over small pieces of what is really very, very big. Sometimes I feel nauseous or overjoyed, too well acquainted with the anticipation of something new. Sometimes I spill over. Let me write into this. Let me right this. Let me imagine how the making of bread and breaking of salads and placing of fingers into the mouth is everything and life itself.

The morning continues into this. It is the making of tea, then leaving it to cool and not taking it. Mint leaves photosynthesise in the light and sweetness of the water. They make their way further into the bottom of the glass, thinking they are dead leaves, old leaves. But I am hungry for them, too. I take them between my index and thumb. I take them as one devours food, and am still hungry. I can eat all these words and let them move through me in a steady stream of inhalation and digestion to be expelled. I speak with the different parts of my body, engaged with eating into all of this, I consecrate this metaphor as essential. You bless this story with your eyes, and make all that is unseen holy. Stripped to a fundamental backbone of hungry necessity. In this story, I choose not to add sugar to the cereal bowl, and relish the base of it all. I let all these phantom foundations come to show. Come to be consumed. Flavours I know only in my mother's mother's mother tongue. Holding it all still, there, in a sort of womb before the process of creation becomes one of erasure. Soil awaiting saturation. Sinking into the luxury of getting watered. This mouth. Dissolving solidity. Of allowing an almost eternal opening of space between teeth and transformation. There is nothing that can be held there for too long without being soaked in. To become another form which takes in, and lots out. The mouth expels its own breath, its own language, as I do. I leave this all open, waiting and holding.

The day and the night shift the sun slightly so that it curves into an arch across the sky and forgets its yawn. How easy it is for things to disappear into themselves. Unafraid to bend tenderly towards the minute. The puppeteer tends to the dropped penny in the sky. I await a trick. An opening. I wonder if I sit in this story all night until we find it, that it may appear spectacular and magnificent behind some velvet curtain. There is some sort of silver alignment, like one of a magician, from words in the morning. Like this. The slow, supportable weight. I am kind to the egg, soft to the bread. Slicing of them into thin rims for a willing mouth. Nothing sacrificial, just magical. Just a show of theatre to be peppered up. The sun disappears behind the clouds, and I remember, upon its return, how to lose sight of the thing that could have been the beginning. Nothing in the kitchen is trying to build itself anymore. There is only the ing and it is running away. A fugitive— dashing. It runs away, runs away, (it was running, it has run, it will run) as an rounded egg does. A shell so full and heaving with life. Bursting, the verb sighs itself out like a yolk and forgets where it started. A beginning which stops birthing itself. There is still sun and a running yellow I try to hold in my hands.

Before the light moves anymore, before the start of anything, I must tell you how it may all dissipate. How all my beginnings become buried by inattentiveness. The holiness of these things is no longer a string of universes. The line of ants scatter, the apple core writhes like a magic trick, and the incense curdles into a dead thing dying. I may stop loving all these movements, as they leave their source of self and descend to something else. Squashing the past into syntax, a choking of choice, our stomachs will soon grow hungry again. And our may eyes cease the search for something to discover, something to touch and smell and hear. And then, without anything in my hands, I meet the countertop of the table. They all come to sit down with me, the frowning sunlight, the wheels rolling on the road outside. The sticky jam, indented by ants. There is something beginning, and it is breakfast time. Everything is always breakfast time.