Midway on the journey of our lives
Now on a path we didn’t know we’d chosen
Now looking backwards could see
Nothing other than the steps that brought us here
Found the way unlit
Under droplets belonging to
A wilder, stranger will

If the lovers was
Or could be fixed stars circling
Not an exchange of fluid heat or breath
One breath between two lungs or three
But it is not and will not be.

The heat disperses
The moment passes                   The blood moves out
We cannot stop the blood from moving where it does
And though I want to rest here in my ecstatic poise for you
I can no more do this than I could
Catch the bullet as it flew towards the executioner’s brick wall

You can walk under a half-full moon
And a metaphor can carry a poem like the moon carries
The weight of everything we do under it.
The moon is not a convex orb of rock
But a hole                    A white hole

That the world pours out of…

All that energy                    And information
Has to go somewhere                    New worlds are born

Under a half-full light the glass turns sour.
And the dream that began in the cinema continues
Even after the lights come up and Jon Bon Jovi
Pipes in through the overhead speakers, the red velvet curtain drawn

Is this madness
The dream stalks you
Into the bathroom, where an old wallet appears under your foot
And you exit into the moonpilled night the sun entrancing
People you have not and will not ever meet. The street
And the glass is lifted. You want to scream

THIS IS DECLINE         THIS IS MY SOCIETY
IN THE BEGINNINGS OF DECLINE          AND WE’RE GOING ON
AS THOUGH NOTHING IS HAPPENING
Nothing          is       happening, in truth

Nothing has ever happened under moon or sun that’s left
An indelible mark and the blood begins to pump
And the pharmacy’s completely empty, not a phial on its shelves
The signage faded white and blue
And then the I becomes a You

And it always was trying to bury my fear like
Newspaper under the house. I wanted to bury
Newspapers under the structure of my house. A way of testifying
To what? I do not know. I know sometimes a dream moves into
My liver when I am awake, and when it does I am seized
By a fear I cannot acknowledge because I fear that fear
Destroys me in the end

The fear of losing my mother as I will, the fear of
Not having her there
as I pass through fear to death.
The fear she put in me because no love could grow from there

I’ve brought here by the movement of the moon
The tide
Whose hands are these? They don’t feel like my own, the ones I know
Have known my whole life up to this moment

And now a laughing magpie comes to steal away my breath…

 

___________________

Jake Byrne lives in Tka:ronto, cka Toronto. They won CV2’s Foster Prize for Poetry in 2019. Their debut collection, CELEBRATE PRIDE WITH LOCKHEED MARTIN, was published by Wolsak & Wynn in 2023. DADDY will be published in 2024 with Brick Books.

@jakebyrnewrites
www.jakebyrnewrit.es