For S
The city lights always invade the night:
I just want to fuck you in pure moonlight
or beneath a furious storm,
but the city forever prevents me.
I dream of our escape, but first
we must learn how to be caged
together.
Lines delicately traced,
like a sketch by Toulouse-Lautrec;
all colour & movement, sweeping angles
tangled into a lie more real than the truth:
who is that person now?
What do they dream about?
That the past is forever lost
is the only proof we have that it existed*,
but the City,
the City stays standing:
poisonous giant always reneging
on its promise to keep us safe.
Just as memories will disappear
so too will the city
& all those within it & all those yet to come.
Even the light will die in time
& nothing will remain of the elegant lines;
not yours or mine.
Our strange gift is to know this
& then try
to accept it.
* J.M. Coetzee
The game is rigged, every decision made
into a mistake, chained
to debt
& to regrets;
the boulder becomes heavier & heavier.
No matter how we carry it
– in the stomach or on our shoulders –
the weight will break our backs one day.
Violence is the only way to break the chain,
only through solidarity can we regain
the dignity they stole from us
before the game began.
Fear holds us back,
but we’re always afraid anyway, so:
Losers of the world unite!
All we have to lose are our lives.
Only those who know how to truly love
know how to hate:
we wait for them to despise us,
a prophecy possibly more fulfilling
than anything they’ve offered us before…
Life has become an idea; vapour
rising from the surface of a shrinking
lake, never to return again.
Our first fuck was a clumsy mess,
but am I wrong to see the dignity
we’ve since spent building beginning to crumble?
Who’s the most humble, the pessimist
or the optimist, & is it naive
to believe that the only worthwhile thing
is to keep giving a shit
despite the odds?
‘cos I’m all in now; no backing out:
you’ve got everything I can give.
So it’s time to ride or die, to fight or hide;
to fucking decide & then fall,
if we have to,
on the hill where
we’ve chosen to demand the impossible
& laugh at the improbable.
The city lights conspiring to hide
the cold shimmer of starlight from our eyes;
walks together: a flower & it’s thorns,
sharing our thoughts,
secrets, fears & feelings,
each the other’s mirror
using silk to remove any marks that
prevented us from seeing clearly &
the resulting electrostatic charge
binding us together.
All of this
& more
is a gift,
& every poem I give you
is an attempt to make amends
for being no more than
an unremarkable,
undeserving
mammal.
Words for Ghosts 