Such is the violence required

to stop the body in its tracks.

Some say the spirit – if it exists – hovers

permanently within a hundred metre radius

of its busted, flesh-and-bone cage.
I hurried over to the huge, once encumbered

bulk of her; eyes shut behind spectacles

that cling to her face, oddly

unbroken. Her leg, jumped free from its socket,

was held in place

by what must be size-40 Levis.
Blood through a rip in the jeans

flood a long, squint-eyed cut across her thigh:

the inside of her large body

peeking out. I imagine her spirit easing

its way out of that wound
to stand there, gazing skywards at how

far she had come in the gasp of two seconds,

debating if this was a mistake,

and if she had only known

that death was false, that consciousness

would draw her back to itself

even after the end, inescapable,

like gravity.
But I prefer to believe that she

is gone, just as Leslie Cheung

is gone; that death

is not a rapid corridor

between one prison and the next;
that the sound she made when the pavement

rose generously to meet her

was not the opposite of a bomb

going off.