Polite Love Songs To An Imaginary Paradise

One dull afternoon, when time was a nosebleed, my father attempted to end his days before summer. But perhaps for some reason, a design far too complex or plain bread and butter, he didn’t possess the will to succeed.

He was frank when he whispered to God up above, ‘There’s no polite love song to an imaginary paradise, and there’s no compensation for a life cleansed of beauty’ He told my mother, who stood there half naked with fury and grief, ‘You’re at the other end of everything; the world, the telephone, the street. The telescope that spied the bright shinning North Star as it's crushed by an earthquake and swept under the carpet, then picked apart at the seams in a surgical strike’

Some things end and some things linger. Sometimes the years caught this prison lament with its tones lost in transit between the thunder and lightening.

But I saw him lying there with his hair sleek and golden; the mane of a broken horse frozen under the sea. He was silently drowning with the cold and the faithless, waving in anguish and grateful for pity. And though his heart was a murmur of crippling sadness, his last moments in person still borne down by anger, how could he know if he never once looked, how half of me died on that cold Wednesday day.

Then, one Thursday, much later in time, my father kissed me in his immaculate madness. He braved the dividing line to chance a reunion, still forming the questions to ask before morning. But we both of realised that that delicate kiss, was an empty exchange between strangers divided. And as both of us waited for the light to escape us, we saw we were never the people, we once recognised.