“To the centre of the city in the night, waiting for you”
– Joy Division, “Shadowplay”
The last time I saw you alive, last March, I closed my eyes while hail and wind scattered and slid outside on a metal roof,
I could feel the storm making the ridgeline plot of a rotating neutron star, in black and white, like the one on an old t-shirt
“To help with circulation in the cold”, you said,
You removed my coat, peeling me away into the unlit corners of the room, unbuttoning me with pickpocket-subtle hands,
Pressed ear and breath and beard and mouth, to the snare drum taut skin of my back
And said my heart beating was like a hummingbird’s wings, a thousand times a minute
One seeks unconscious respite where one can find it, often in hindsight
And often with the previous attempt, still spinning down to stillness
Like how last month I accidentally fell asleep, for a moment, while I was getting my hair cut at the salon
The stylist poked my shoulder and I apologized quietly, told her I’d been sick but not with what
What could I possibly say
To explain
These unrelated turnings over,
One a pre-death ritual and one a fever
Take your pick, I ask you though
As your spell-like canticles circle me into the new year, halos of birds too fast to see
Gentle in the moment, greens shot from black earth, clippings swept away down the drain
Things I would have told you, that would have been amusing in their triteness and their unearned honesty
Now paraphrased in asphalt and freezing ozone, bitter bitter
Would you hum the empty world again
Bring it to life, a truce, it’s a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, an armistice of blackbirds
Like radio waves, the shadowgraph machine, documenting on burnt paper, the imagined moment, the assumed, like breathing smoke, escape velocity, trailed after and gone into a sky, as black as your, remembered, eyes
