Wake
“Your swiftly fading daguerreotype I take in my more gradually fading hand”
Portrait of My Father As A Young Man – Rainer Maria Rilke
Do your eyes remember how the dancefloor coloured us on the lonely nights? Can you still
feel the bassline thrumming across the skin of your arms with its electricity how we were so afraid to
touch out of fear of a shock? How we moved around each other pirouette through the dry ice the
sweat the heaving breath just to meet again in the centre risking our slickened hands risk the idle
stares for the sake of tasting liquor from the cup of another boy’s lips?
How that one kiss blurred into years and the dances and moons and then too quickly a
headstone
a stagger and slip that neither of us prepared to catch and still it came as shock that we fell
as if the music of us skipped left us to carry on outside its rhythm
and now here the years swim into view – the ghost of your touch as I turn through
our steps
to a song that only exists in the echoed creak of the boards
beneath my feet.