4. 'drunk on light'
‘DRUNK ON LIGHT’
1:42 am
pseudo dawn-chorus
gliding sirens
drunk on
street lights, or the radiant haze of a bygone sun
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Remembering the light-splashed death of a moth flying through the sharp
projector beam at the open-air cinema—maybe last summer.
Electric colour stretched over the shivering membrane of its wings,
nearly a moment before it clung onto our greasy leftovers;
its silver body damp and disfigured with euphoria:
a detangling of light and dust through taste buds.
The wind was almost peeling our skin off—yet there was a layer of stillness sitting
just above the ground.
In an sudden wind-slap, we inhaled gushes of pollen
with curious playfulness like that of children netting crabs and butterflies.
Time beamed over us, leaping through the golden swarms,
sunset pulsing,
photons tumbling from thistle to thistle to a paper-kite flailing in the gusts,
frail and forgotten—
and on this evening of leaky skin and neon gesture,
I still hear-see the brilliant Euphorbia bushes exploding like fireworks on the
fresh thyme-wash of the Hymettus mountain.
The street light behind you emanated chemical yellow
and in the flickering shadow it threw, i saw your throbbing eyes.
The phosphorescent wet beads cast under your eyes, trapped mine—
and as we merged into a four-eyed spider weaving knots and stories
against the faint blue silence,
as we charged the sticky in-betweenness with silk and with spit,
as we tangled and frayed with gleaming and vulgar finitude,
I realised that this tentacular being we had morphed into as one,
will always know more of light and love than either of us ever will.
Certain nights were so thin, we could hear the light humming through our bodies;
the edges of our insides glowing like a lunar halo—
to think that almost every single atom inside us erupted out of the same kiln
as the moon,
to think that all the memories of this world are trapped in that white noise of
light that dwells in the universe
was always exhilarating to us.
Time and again, we would look up into a world at once extinct and living,
tracing constellations and searching for memories in the glistening mist
between them:
«Έλα να βρούμε τρόπους να μεγαλώσουμε το βράδυ» *
I still remember the time you saw lightning in a dust storm on Mars, and a
firefly’s slow blade of light as it cut through the humid midnight sky;
it must have been the night that I saw the flicker of a lamp burning on whale
fat from centuries ago, and the glow-in-the-dark stars from my childhood
bedroom.
a circus of images as elusive as light—
but for a brief instant, we glimpsed them.
* “Let’s find ways to make the night last longer”