Familiar Strangers

                         From a grief prononcé
                                   to the slightest nuance of regret,
                                             carved into a cameo of Whitby Jet—

                         i.

The cinema is a morgue,
guilt framed like the first
dollar earned by a whore.
With his own eyes the
actor must shed the tears
of the other, bringing mayhem
to the desert. For familiar
strangers making their human desire
more remarkably resilient to filth,
tongue to fundament, a voice
as though on a radio
from another room, I’ve done
my reading, but have you
yet done a reading? By
the refinement of my ironies
and the brutality of these
invectives, I should get oracular
and consult the Otherworld. Throw
the bones, shuffle the cards,
scry every black mirror. He
shimmers there and threatens to
dissolve an embroidery of visions
into texts without images, vigils
kept as nuances withheld. Christ
is the Serpent of Genesis.
Here the soil is human
ash. The labyrinth collapses into
geometry hand-hewn bruised ruby hue,
here where weirdness is divided
into seasons. Where do you
go when you vanish from
history, carrying only the treasures
of your faith? Constraints in
need of being restrained, banishing
in need of being banished.
A night of strange visions,
a night of strange weather,

                         ii.

sulfur in our hour of
splendour. The riddle, the whisper,
the threat: do you even
know who you aren’t? We
need your blood to nourish
the earth. We want to
raise a burning bush from
the rot of your corpse.
A warning to posterity jet
as mourning stone, my mourning
veil was wearable grief. Face-down
in a language the danger
understood, offering you space to
transition into shades. A song
that flies up through falling
snow into an ashen heaven
disintegrating, done in a way
of diluting the black and
with that the sorrow, as
the griever gradually eases out
of mourning. Whatever powers you
obey, the sea greets me
like a wall of granite.
Visual silence. Historian of the
unheroic past whispering the hours,
at the approach of our
enemies, let’s jump dimensions for
the next few centuries, endure
not as a curse but
as a mirror. Pharaoh without
a sarcophagus, bereavement requires building
an entire new wardrobe, outward
display of inner sorrow. A
sexual life as overt as
my true self is covert.
Open the eye of the
lock. Spiritual Chernobyl. From a

                         iii.

dead black to a dull
lead colour, stages of distress
build a grave for a
secret. For a delicate relic,
the salt water is a
slow-motion incinerator. A tabloid version
of a life waiting to
be remembered under a cloud,
I was never hiding, I
was screaming water in search
of thirst. Farewell to Nova
Scotia’s wealth of tragedy worthy
of deposit in a Gloucester
Island Memory Pit, backfill its
grave with a curse tablet
written facing down. The slaughter
of accents buys back my
mourning veil from the pawnshop.
Undaunted, cautious, contentious. As too
little disrespects the dead, too
much raises questions, engenders accusations
of aspirational mourning, tends to
suggestions of performative grief without
regret. A veil to protect
my sighs from prying eyes
and to hide my tears,
black gave way to dark
grey, shading into dove, mauve,
lavender, and violet. Grave sins
against propriety fled to me
to build the refuge you
once sought. A pilgrimage to
wherever you are an echo
in the overwhelm, let the
flame-throwers play with matches, we
need to hire better exorcists.
It’s painful seeing you well.