birth of verse, on the annual occasion of the

for Brecht de Velastegui

verse, happy birthday. happy birthday to you.
to your ghosts and to all the children
you have written and yet to write.

i've just hummed a gregorian chant in your honor.
a steady succession of 365 beats makes a rhythm.
you are young and your body still lies below
the readable surface. you're a living moment:
a relic of movement unraveling, the always
that is arriving.

just remember: someday you’ll abolish the stage
and the spectator will assume its role as spectacle.
time approaches the vault of heaven like a u.f.o.
tossed through the soft glass of a retina.

there will be a point at which all astrological forces reverse:
when the subject no longer exists, when the I is asserted
only from otherness – the final slaughter of mirrors.

in my dreamworld you appeared first as substrate:
earthclay, prophesy, pubic hair. and when lightning
struck the bed you painted upon page 92,
you took the body of an f-sharp.

just remember: you've yet to appear as words
that some man is already reading and sucking at
as they come out of his mouth. he's tonguing
your syllables in a world you've yet to know.
this is the year you’ll earn the right to reserve
your own ghost.

just remember: you're the woman eating an apple
in an earthquake. you're the funambulist edging forward
on the wire in your head until you declare to all below:
there is no wire! – and you fall into the void that is the public
agape in awe.

you're the phoenician sailing sideways without a sail
in a world without stars where space accumulates
in a giant bathtub of phlegm that only evaporates when
you cough up the bronchitic codas of failed dead poets.

just remember: in every possible world there are people
in bedouin tents on rocky shores. they're chanting blow, blow.
they're waiting for you, all wearing masks of your face.
i'm one of them.

Eric Lind is a literature editor at Caterwaul Quarterly. He lives in New Orleans, where he is a freelance writer and urban farmer.