Lee Morgan

tunnelling into old Stone memory

I threw up again after drinking the remaining laudanum. This time I swore it was his hair coming out of me. It reached deep in me like tendrils. As I pulled the long, dark strands of it out of my throat by the fistful I gagged on all the sharp edges of his broken heart. I think I coughed out a whole music box while my death river rushed and rushed beside and inside me. I think I coughed out yesterday, and tomorrow, and all the times were happening at once again in a wretch-crescendo. Somewhere over there, over West, further, further on, where all the light goes to hide from the evil in the heart of man, where the veil of mist goes down and never really comes back up again, I could see that the dead still live on the other side of mountain, and the worlds melt in on each other when the weather condenses us down to the nodule of ourselves . Such is this thing we call magic, the thing that’s happening to us both right now.