Is this your practice, to build a Technicolour garden around yourself? To whip yourself into crescendo, your arms humming like the wings of small insects? I suppose I have always known that you were bold. I have redeemed the investment of your hands, next time you feel the urge to clap them in prayer you will notice I am holding them. I have taken them as my due price. Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora oh how much I sway. When it’s sunny I eat baby carrots on the grass and ponder my size relative to everything else, which sometimes is huge but mostly is small, really tiny, but I don’t mind one bit. See, my throat is loose and willing to abandon its control of my voice. We could sit in silence, if your arms should stop humming. We could pause here motionless with our toes open over the deep, if only your joints would lie still also. See, it’s like this: In Death Valley I led you out of the box of night and you let me have my way with your body. And there, for a while behind the sun soaked wall, perhaps too long, we wept and giggled at the uncertainties. How endless this all is! My chest, you told me, it will only grow weaker from now. It will only ever soften. It will only ever become more remote to everything but itself. My hair, it will thin. My skin will loosen its grip on my jaw. It is written, it is forecast, my heart will sink like a treeless root. It is all true and I don’t care. But you are terrified that your red hair will rust and your eyes shrink. You stand in the side streets expecting your teeth to fall from your lips already fossilized. Why else do I find you collapsed on the floor? Your clock; you think if traced with chalk it will not move. But listen, together we are a gasp in the lungs of time. No one else has heard it, I swear, not one soul. It is lost on everyone but us. But it sings in my ears like a holy metropolis of sound. I have never been so sure! We are perfect and lonely and godforsaken. But know this: I am suffering with your collapse. I am bursting like a star, flirting with the bluebirds of mercy. My elbows are raw. All day your mouth has been making perfect circles. O after O after O and I can’t bear it. If I could I would paint the back of your throat, now that I can imagine it in great detail. It is pink like the world had promised. Loneliness itself, you said, O there is no such thing, only the source of it. A place, a person, perhaps an object. But I am not so sure, I am not so sure at all. Certainty, you said, O there is no such thing, not even in diluted form. O Kora, my silence suggests that we agree. I am as tired as a bedside prayer. I feel older than the basilica of night. O Kora, I assure you that as my lips imitate yours they are not chapped. It would be rude to speak while the body assumes such damage. That clock on the wall, please would you remove it. Take it away and with it what it has witnessed. Be kind and be swift. Then we’ll wrap up gentle in the wind of blues. With the clock gone we’ll light fireworks in the mud huts of the mind and babble like the saints of gossip. We’ll pass our hands over the candle of death and kiss in the smoke. Imagine it; we will celebrate like we used to celebrate, before the long lament of summer, before I broke down before the altar of the city. Just say you will, say you will take it down, say it loud and big and absurd like pain through a telescope.
