Through your lens, millions of viewers watch me disappear.
First I’m sharp, then dull; the way one confronts an obelisk

backlit by emptiness: one bold queasy note occupies you whole
before the next relieves it. I’m in that next note now,
kept in outline … fondly. With perfect playback your medium ravels
the after advent of shock, recreating the unsettling moment

without the necessary disturbing parts.
Whole and half steps escape before you perfect the scale--
bodies carried by thrumming motors—returning
to smoke and sausage stands and garbage, detritus

plunging bare streets exotic in a mix of perfumes.
We might have started holding hands but now I exist
only in the whiff of firelight,
flickered into windows.

That speaks more eloquently than anything, O,

about you … me … you wanted me to hold all the way.
If I only wound up in eyes, at least a million eyes like yours
spattered the path of flight. Those weren’t glittering stones.

And now I’m used to being seen. I’ve habituated you.

What is it? Two hundred, two hundred twenty disintegrated stories in the city?
Is this the height we’ve come to? So disastrously
built-up no safe way in precarious moments exists to come down?
Speed or trajectory pulls hands apart.

There, romantic, let us leap into our precarious moments.
That’s the window through which we press. Come down with me.
I burn, get fuzzy, bleared and mote-sparkled. It’s history now,
you always turning to look at the newsbyte … this one way to die.

It’s not our story that matters. It’s how it ended in your eyes,
how a sound returned it, and then a heat, and then a loop.
And framing it is your gift--
memory seems to hang in pure space. This is its odyssey.

But it really happens like buildings--all those windows act like mirrors.
You vanish back to life and I remain, collapsed in my time.

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