Your Last Orbit

did you just die there in the night?

I can’t hear those wild wings anymore, that frantic beating gone silent like a jazz riff cut short in some dim basement club.

you were drunk on pure panic, bashing your tiny skull against the cheap IKEA lamp I got last week, that blinding circle of false sun calling you home like a siren in the fog, pulling you into its hot electric death.

I sat here at the typewriter, half-sick with the flu or the soul or whatever it is that drags a man down these days, fingers tapping out these sad words, listening to your suicide symphony, that tired buzz humming under the tin shade like the low moan of a trumpet player who’s lost his way home.

you stopped once, landed shaky on that chunk of old gouda I’d left crumbling on the table for the mouse that never shows his whiskers, like a weary traveller slumping onto the last barstool in a roadhouse at dawn, wings folding for a breath.

then back at it, ramming the light again, looping desperate in the glow, kamikaze orbits around that phony moon till the room went dead quiet, no more buzz, no more flutter, and you dropped straight down like a spent rubber from some forgotten lover’s night, plop onto my desk.

that was your last loop, your final dive into the infinite, gone out fighting the false light that tricks us all.

and here I am in this Kreuzberg hole, sucking the last warm swallow from the vodka bottle, the one that burns going down like truth, raising it to you in the dim.

cheers, little fly, you were the crazy saint of the lamp.

you went out fighting the glow.

I’m still here, fighting it too, only much slower, typing through the haze, waiting for my own quiet drop.

last orbit fades slow,
dirty vodka burns the throat,
Paris train at dawn