Coming back to claim this forgotten land
as a three-headed chimera brushing its
mare against the shore. Waking back to
a morning of promises, flowers, seedbeds
and a black screen, a matrix of scents;
waking beside deep braided hair, coffee,
secret messages under our heads. Waking up –
just waking up is memory devising itself.
The chamberlain comes out with my
father and for the first time I see how nicely
dressed my father is too. Sapphire theme
calicos, one of those modern ties, slim fit jeans
heavy CAT men’s boots, brown fedora hat – yah.
Black Art, black magic: things that a man can only
tell his son, radiating between us, biting
back the distance, cutting the landscape
into binary nodes and stuffing them under a
tongue. I whisper when I text you and
you understand. We wake up to the new
night dust settling on the drapes
on the tv stand – yah.
This is how I imagine every midnight –
playing radio. I claim you as my own forgotten Jubilee
a memory of myself holding a new bulb and moving into a crowd.
A radio seems like a pathetic invention in the morning. I like to tease you.
Every day I wake up a war baby, brown and
turning in your stomach. They read the news,
something about dying cattle in the inner country.
We have new friends now.
We only send them our best pictures.