Afterlife 1: After the Fall

Sunrise after the accident feels strange.

               Does the universal wave function conceal a forking path?

The stumble, the fall, the inexplicable break in memory -

How exactly did I get back to the bed?

I replay vague memory fragments -

A bump on the head, a troubled sleep, then waking to

this … an over-bright morning.

I ponder each fragment lying naked under starchy sheets.

My headache pulses.

Though we drank until midnight, we didn’t sleep together -

despite wild fantasies of future-scented bliss.

For the moment, the business of the day seems

impossible to prosecute:

my ‘briefing’, the ‘take-over’, the ‘new agenda',

all of it seems impossible to prosecute.

A sudden urge to check my personal belongings:

the lap-top, the company credit card, my passport ...

Nothing is amiss, so I dress for breakfast

watching a thick swirl of blue-black storm clouds

build to the west.

We meet in the guestroom and I know with certainty

that the old rules no longer apply.

 Breakfast is fragile, we don’t say much. We are 

not lovers – will we ever be lovers?

I swallow a tablet with two gulps of orange juice.

Intuitions become whispers:

I am not myself today … or maybe I am more of myself?

You muse about the sun rising over Belgium, but

I point to the storm front,

the lightning flashes, the ominous cloud banks.

The sky is split at intervals and eerie light

pervades the guestroom.

My headache – as if loyal to each jag of lightning -

refuses to recede. 

Though slated to discuss the company's 'New Direction' at 10am

I ask you to take me to a clinic instead.

[From Book Two (The Isle of Ruins) of the ‘Songs of the Interstitium’ a multi-genre, many-worlds, many selves transmedia project] Poem copyright Ian Irvine (Hobson) 2017 all rights reserved. First published by Zoetics Institute Transmedia Collective 2017.