Fade by Brendon Booth-Jones

       Alexander Rabb CC


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Fade

If I plucked the plastic seashells
away from my ears

and stopped straining for God’s garbled whispers,
could I learn to be fluent in whale-speak?

The sunlight might wreck itself in the glass vase.
My lips might sleep at heaven’s throat.

But here I am with my dedication to distraction,
and here they are with their shiny algorithms.

Have you ever abandoned ship? These days,
for a fiver, you can sip the soul of a dolphin

in any given nightclub toilet for a year-long minute.
Yes, but have you huffed the acid-breath

of vomited dreams in the mirror? Strobe light
and bass in your bones, a pleasant terror.

And then you exit night’s nostril and scatter
your youth into the umpteenth dawn.

Do you remember 
that long winter when I painted self-portraits

in the liquid black of your pupils?
Sometimes a song would open

like a floral afterthought:
sweet but fading fast, like the scent of trees in the rain.

Now mostly what I taste when I kiss your neck 
is a remote sadness.

But maybe it’s the lack of sleep that gets me,
days strung together like fake pearls.
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Brendon Booth-Jones is the general editor of Writer’s Block Magazine in Amsterdam. Brendon’s photographs, poems and prose have appeared in the Peeking Cat Anthology 2018, Amaryllis, Botsotso, Neologism, Odd Magazine, Verdancies, Zigzag and elsewhere.

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