Smothered in the Crib

                         i. As Above

Putting up a fluorescent fight,
stormed in the unblinking eye
of overhead lights, big public
gods with stone temples reading
tombstones as documents riddle their
whispers with threats, the city
was laid out anticipating unrest,
not peace. It’s the longest
love letter ever written. I
want for my biographer to

write of us that we
are former flames, yet we
have never kindled, even though
I have since long ago
been reading you like an
e-book. These texts have nothing
on it. The Empire designed
for longevity: land ownership outlived
technology, training outlived paperwork, geometry
outlived guns. A declaration of

war delivered from a pulpit
with a promise that lands
like a grenade, Victoria’s Secret
is Halifax’s tunnel network, buried
beneath streets carrying threads telegraphing
lacunæ ripped from palimpsests, ever
questioning: why is the water
bleeding gold? Within this dizzying
labyrinth of rituals, cinema becomes
an act of dreaming. The

way King’s was just Brideshead
Regurgitated, the mystery persists not
because there is no answer,
but because the answer belongs
to an empire that no
longer exists, is why the
successor state inherited a lie,
how truth was just smothered
in the crib. Cultured, comforting,
comfortable bunker that it was,

buffering us from tumult above,
ours is a fort with
a city, not a city
with a fort, as a
photograph is a thing taken,
theft on film. An ambush
of hype and hush. The
Royal Weening off of Us,
just as under the doctrine
of Sovereign Immunity, state property

cannot be lost or abandoned,
title persists and can be
claimed in perpetuity, in some
cases, conquest is an absolute
must. Waxing spectacular, about to
spit praises at you in
vernacular, unabashèd as the racist
who takes his coffee black,
who takes nothing back, this
is an attack on sovereignty.

An act of subversion performed
with the pageantry of manufactured
majesty. Wilde wrote it in
prison, his missive dredged From
the Depths, a Victorian Gilgamesh
who saw the deep and
lived on emptily, perpetuating loss
echoing through a fading century’s
growing ambiguity, devoid of his
messiest beastliest anything but best

                         ii. So Below

friend, rent like a veil
stretched across a vast wilderness,
guilty of being gay, written
to his gay lover, who
sent him to prison, for
being gay, then a crime,
who never read the letter,
ever. It is the most
scathing, tragic, beautiful, melancholic thing
I have ever read. It

is not about always doing
evil, but never doing good.
The light is to be
kept alive only as a
memory, the way the substance
of kingship descends to earth
and moves around. Though it
could be read as a
stab in the back, instead,
the vastness of the British

Empire would be used as
a scalpel. Sudden deployment. Toying
with Schadenfreude’s vicarious enjoyment of
a stranger’s adjacent suffering, this
embrace of the mysterious as
the subtext which births bones
from broken ground, sounding overground
sell-out seismic shifts hinting at
the civilization beneath the silt.
It is as long as

a book, was censored until
recently. I worry that your
pleasure is not their priority.
I have a thing for
tragic love, I guess, longwindedness,
and guys I wish I
could fix. Building in pixels
a digital fortress of letters
piled onscreen like blinking bricks.
This is my last ditch

attempt at connecting through what
can be said, though speech
always fails to express what
can be felt sent through
unseen avenues. It is as
if, forced beneath the gorge
of what soldiers forced to
go from Fort George to
Fort Charlotte, miserable as a
message channelled from my Citadel

to your Island, harbouring what
resentment cut cables prevent from
presenting as my case against
letting go of what explosive
connection communicated by our touch
you torched when you left,
as the Brits did, nothing
but a mess. A rat’s
nest network of nixed passages
mixing messages, crossing wires so

much that, the next time
I dug into the flesh
of what was left, the
cost of knowing too much
made me wish your ghost
showed the way back to
our grave they made of
the old Halifax where was
laid the most exhausting myth
of love to never rest.