...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auFp3-8yORQ

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(fiction)

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If I could conjure an ode to a nightingale,

I would; instead, I summon words 

for seagulls

and cast my thoughts across 

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the harbourfront 

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like breadcrumbs over

an empty beach. 

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It is a quarter past three, on a Tuesday afternoon, 

and I am sitting on a park-bench 

at the Horseshoe-Bay ferry terminal, 

smoking a cigarette and 

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waiting 

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for Departure-Bay to send its 

        bi-hourly emissary: 

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a ferry home - I'm waiting 

for a ferry home, but I 

might as well be waiting 

for either 

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Christ's second coming, or 

             the arrival of Godot. 

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I am dying. And I know that I am dying 

because I can feel it; 

there's rust in the pockets of my lungs,

carbon in my arteries so as to 

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block and jam my heartbeat

and stall the whole f*****g engine. 

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I am dying, because somewhere 

in the reservoir of my breast

is a genetic miscarriage, a tumor

bred by a mutated gene 

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and a cell

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that'd somehow traveled from my anus 

along the lengths 

of my small and large intestines 

before settling into some fatal nest 

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beneath the ribs - that god had surely invented - 

to protect the organs, hid, behind the sanctuary

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of my hardened, bony chest.

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I cough, 

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even though I'm sitting here

thinking up these lines -  

too many - words - not enough - 

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breath. 

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And so I take another loving pull 

from the glowering length of my cigarette

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and go back to wondering 

how Keats

might've made his own untimely death 

sound

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                    so motherfucking 

romantic. 

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