Aaron Kent

PRELUDE TO A CRIME SCENE

We were, all three of you, asleep when I saw the roof beams
as shadows of my name. My favourite spelling is K-N-I-F-E,
for its infinite versions of us—
cutting and blunt, resting and falling.
How to contemplate the rafters
while uncertain of what is pecking at the crude underbelly?

Two streets and a childhood away the coffee machine stuttered,
its motor grinding down the nubs of arabica and robusta.
How many cups had we made today? How many refills
for our trembling hands counting the ways the work will kill us.

Too many coffees later, I slipped a note into the cup
of the regular who also knew what it meant to feel a brain
awash in a pool of blood. She never read it, too engrossed
in the stirring of crema into patterns and promises.
The words leaked out onto the table,
I too know there are worse things than love,
and less treacherous things than walking the dog at midnight.

After she left I wiped my name from the fake marble
and quit my job. There's only so many cigarette breaks
you can watch colleagues take before you fill
your lungs with the tumour of somebody else’s grief.

Oh you, still in slender sleep—
you have so many more takes to get it right,
but all of this is a matinee for a greater act of malevolence,
a world where tomorrow’s headlines are printed today.

What need is there for sleep
when sleep is the most solipsistic act,
when doing so robs us of one way
of bearing witness to state sanctioned violence.

I still find my name on coffee tables in big cities.
It appears, misspelled, in the rings of stained cups,
among the smudges of unwashed hands.
And yet, I leave it,
I let it stand—
a reminder that turning away
does not mean putting down your arms.

SONG FOR LIFE SUPPORT

I await the pain of not knowing—
the soul's anxious purgatory.
Where time stretches its webbed hand
across IV drips and muscle memory.

Among the bluster of machinery,
the monotone of a life
lived in perpetual ambiguity,
herein I observe the metronome:
its steady tick, its small god deciding
those in continuity and those who linger.

I appreciate the tidings of bandages and painkillers—
their sterile kindnesses.
Brain, be gentle with me and my new remedies,
await me as I wake. Consciously we fear what we know,
for fearing what we don't is akin to malice and misery.

I am jelly and hostage to a clot,
abundant in sleep for the weak and a week.
If I exist as indifference, then so be it.
Let me be indifferent to my own mortality,
to each lunar phase volta'd into seizures
and climactic action unwitnessed.

When I wake, new to stroke,
abundant in an atrial fresh body,
I resolve to die again,
we are nothing but our resolve
to die on any acre our bodies fall.

I free the soul from burden,
allow it to breathe in anticipation.
I let it move through shadows and parallel universes,
the faint spaces between the blips
of hardware and its hesitant mechanism.

Prone I witness the strength of collapse—
how fragile the body is when weighed in grief.
Pity and piety beside the stricken
corners of hospital bedsheets where
I sing for the lost and vow to renew our vows.

 PANCHO MAKES MEDICINE FROM STEM CELLS

 When I write in 1st person I dream

 of dying.

 When I write in 3rd person I dream

 of long walks

 five hundred meters below sea level.

 O, grey wolf on white, let me see

 mighty elephants,

 let me see how to cremate what we lost

 and present it

as light forming through a stormy sky.