We are gathered here today,
to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of our demise.
A long time ago we were young and
newspaper tabloids ran
stories of us in every issue —
Visionary!
Innovative!
Grand!
I’ve spent years of my youth fishing for the sun and
found it in our dreams
Cities rose from nothing
We bought skyscrapers with only
sleepless nights and sunken cheeks.
But
no one saw the
quicksand under concrete and we are now
sinking.
sinking.
Listen. There are bells in the distance. The deep chanting of mountains. A slow drumbeat starts within hollow caverns. Listen to the flapping of wings. There lies their bodies. Musical exhalations on the wind. She inhales, then breathes out. A thousand leaves have fallen in the second you blinked. Gunshots like thunder. One, two, then three. They are coming like a tidal wave. Listen. There is nothing but silence.
I see Thursday meadows in your
Eyes, children with wildflower
Breaths lace honeysuckle wreaths
To adorn the crowns of their heads
And they whisper stories that trace
Back to the mountains and to the
People who raised us, in the villages
We sing of the March equinox as a
Fair maiden and I heard you laughing
By the rosebush last night, crimson
Petals were blooming out of your
Palms on the first day of Spring.
I’ve never really appreciated you.
Like how I’ve never really appreciated each breath I took in, each rise and fall of my chest — what a miracle it was. What I regret the most is that I never told you how much you really meant to me. That if you only asked I would take you to the ends of the earth.
Which is why I tried to keep you with me, even though it was better for you to leave.
But realizations come too late. As my voice echoes around your abandoned room, the silence is deafening.
And all those empty promises we made, how we told each other that we would have our happy ending, were all more useless than the boxes and boxes of pills they made you take. No matter how many pages I placed by your bedside, how many love poems I wrote you in the candlelight, how many pretty words I whispered against your lips, I couldn’t save you.
But I tried.
“Stay,” I used to write by your side, as your eyes flickered rapidly beneath shut eyelids.
I tried to make you stay.
All work and no play makes Blake a dull boy. All work and Yoplait makes Blake slightly more cultured.
Our shrapnel hearts collide and rattle rust-iron ribs
like mechanical birds straining
to fly
Last night, I dreamt about monsters. Teeth and claws and bloodshot eyes rising out of the ground.
It was horrific. But it made me think of you.
Of your lazy glances and laughs-that-weren’t-really-laughs.
Of the things I wanted to shout at you.
Like — we created this monstrosity between us together so let’s take responsibility.
This Frankenstein that fell apart as soon as we took it off the operating table.
Then I woke up in a cold sweat, clenching my fists around the empty sheets next to me.
Last night, I dreamt of you.
A thin telephone wire connects our hands, white knuckles clenched tight over plastic receivers. I feel a bit like the static today, love. Flickering in and out with your voice on the breeze. A gossamer string. And if I try I can almost pretend that your unseen smiles hold longing. But it’s like the radio towers have disconnected us, and nothing is getting through. Our voices have traveled thousands of miles only to die at our fingertips.
plays: 31
Swiftly - Shane Koyczan
It’s easy to write late at night, when the weight of holding your head high throughout the day has compressed your spine and snuffed out the optimism you awoke with, like a heel to the end of a cigarette. Words flow easily the closer you approach midnight, as the light from the street lamps outside the window, that do little more than block out the stars in the city. The sky becomes the colour of rotting plums, and is as easily ruptured. One intent stare is all it takes to make it trickle down on to the white of your pages.
When the moon has taken the warmth from the air, it seems obvious that the pavement is bruised skin, tender from the trampling of a thousand pairs of feet, because only the night is enormous enough to contain the immensity of the human condition. Desolation feeds the creative spirit as much as good company constricts it, which is why I’m writing this in the light of a clean morning, when it’s hard to be anything but hopeful.
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