hide and seek canan erbil | ryan griffith

Can I part these curtains of breathto find you sleeping blue in your veins, eyes inked with night?

I carve you from wood andplace you in the drawer of ringswhere you sleep like bad milk.

Soft in the death of İstanbul, like a second poison throbbing in the blood.

Subtracted from the bedwe lose the light and returnto clay.

You are the last sick storywritten in my cells, how thereis life beyond these tears.

To step into someone else’s storyand accept their ink as your own, this is the second life of fiction.

Little machine, I have so many clues but have forgotten the mystery.Teach me your secret language, tell me that we are not dust. Help me to unremember myself to another place.The nightis large and my candle is dimming, and I am very afraid.

Little machine, you are so quiet and I am waiting. Does anyone hear your song?Do you have a name? I can speak to you forever and never hear your voice.

The detective touchesall the names of the missing, each letter raised likethe braille of a scar.

The detective knows the story begins well beforethe story beginsand the story never ends.

The detective hangs his coat in the sky and opens the book of night, his fingers walkinglike blind men throughthe city’s dreams.

The detective sitsin the sky watching us through glass meadows. He knows what we will doand yethe will not stop us.

what remainsafter the rust has done its work,tearing its teeth through ourdeepest mechanisms, eatingthe hearts of our locks, the guts of our engines, all the metals we believedwere permanent?

hide and seek canan erbil | ryan griffith