MYSPACE, 2009

after Isabella Cho

After this is over, what heaven? We can't go yet
because we've still so much to say. What about your early years
wandering around London on your own, how antiseptic, numb?
How in the afterlife "So What" by P!nk will still be playing
on your page, how in Covent Garden you're stuck at an overpriced
brunch with people you hate & want nothing more
than to kick off your sensible shoes & walk barefoot over the Thames.
Or I want to say something about the way afternoon light falls
through the window & it's just like water, the way I can always guess the
correct number of jelly beans in any jar so I think I'm God.
Oh God, I could be so fucking full of myself, like I'm
phosphorous, I photosynthesize, I forget bank holidays but
then I wasn't me yet, still waiting for something more: & all around
me, the world tricking its way into my heart

__

2009

Here on the dawn road, we're watching in silence
as the white horse charges so fast into the horizon
its thunderous body could become tomorrow. I'm not asking
whether I'll ever be able to give the best of myself
without feeling empty, so you're not saying nothing
in response: the absence of absence. I win. In the quiet
of the approaching minutes the horse's body blooms so fast, so
possible, that I know you've changed: No.
We're both standing here in the cold morning where there's no
white horse but only the swirl of frost escaping your mouth
as you speak, asking for the pity I barely have in me to give
because you know that time is simply horse-like,
its future always muscling forward towards the same horizon: No,
maybe I'm the white beast, stubborn & huffing,
stomping my hooves against the pavement, & you're just
the hot air escaping my flared nostrils as I run
the road, barrel-like chest heaving, heaving: No, looks like
I'm still the only person you're not scared to say sorry to,
because: No, no, no, I was the white horse that long outran itself,
yes, yes: hooves cutting empty air:

__

My memories of writing "Myspace, 2009" include: copying sonnets down in my notebook. Lots of lying upside down in my room reading Frank O'Hara. The cold blue of evening winter walks and computer screens. Listening to a lot of AG Cook and silvery Charli XCX songs. It gets dark so early in the winter and I still feel that in the poem—but that might just be another memory.

As for "2009": more icy blues of evening winter walks and computer screens, except this time with the sidewalk in front of my childhood home too.