The Falling

By | 1 August 2016

I want the building
that stretches up past
the top of the white like driving

up a summer road into heat-haze
that ends, might end, here
with low gray

and I never noticed the sky.
Why fear what’s out of the frame?
I cannot name this city

except to say I went there once
and everywhere was white
and perpendicular and nothing

was like myself or my city.
Man has not burnt with fire,
this building shall not either.

Black has a falseness.
I grow nostalgic
for primary colours, for sound.

But I work when the scenes
only empty,
the end of the stairs.

I think the sky is clouded
but maybe it’s not. They can create me,
I give myself the lassitude of stone.

I wanted none of this. Speech
beyond speechlessness.
A slow lyric.

Step away from me,
back towards the cars
parked resting in a row.

I want to gather together
our last breaths
and float.

I cast nothing behind. Step.
I’ll find a piece of wood
to step to. A bridge.

I’m casting shadows you can’t see.
Here. It’s all the way
gone down slow.

Talk slower. My building
to tear. You tear.
Wear myself, your sleeve,

tissue thin, skin,
voice is the opposite
of cloud.

I’ve missed
the sensate elements of thought.
Your mouth

tastes metal as you fall,
or as you remember
falling.

What my hand holds
is not mine,
but the sensation is,

those small tendrils
of electricity.
I am never going to be a person.

I am never going to be a person
who dies in a fire,
I am never going to.

Put your face
up against
a window,

it’s yours
these clouds,
slow pokes of air,

your lungs burn,
even if a fire
couldn’t make a match flicker,

keep this: sand, sky, stone,
the grim thing of what’s outside,
your own fallow feelings,

the falling.

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