THAT

Moon, when it hangs roof-top low, a globous threat of consumption; the most beautiful death. That was Valentine’s Day, the time for celestial gestures and organ-shaped gifts designed for swooning, which is really only an insufficient delivery of oxygen to the brain, via hypotension or other mechanisms. That twitch in your leg was not desire or impatience, just a tic-ticking reminder of how hope is sometimes a paper street, etched on the map but never materialising in the concrete bellies of buildings that slice out the sun in the neatest of geometries. It might also have been guilt, a muscular contraction signalling a neuropathway to a memory of that message, of a friend whose bones were ready to fold into the dirt, eyes closed to bear the pressure of all the world above. That off-centre heart, as blind as worms and justice, which stuttered at the thought of the words the mouth would have to make and so you never rang. Autolysis is that word for self-digestion; diagenesis for the process that leaves only fossil clues of a body’s song. That star you love is already dead, its light nothing more than an echo in transit.