I picture myself in older age
placing flowers on the table
in a painfully silent room
with no assurance from anyone
that things were in fact, real
or that anyone remembers
how I said I felt, and as I
sit down at the table
with a pen, and some paper
I glance up quickly
at the flowers,
and something clicks
and I am back there
I discover a photographic
memory for carefully arranged
and planted produce
in evenly seeded rows, and
I discover a photographic
tendency for
an ever changing face,
placed at a distance, hidden
in figures of speech and slips
of a faded tongue
“You look like someone
that I know,
but not as well as I know you,
or so I thought I knew”
and it all comes crashing back
I’m in my kitchen
with a lacerated vision
of a past with no redeemers
of a life I didn’t live in
of a god with no believer,
a believer with no god.
Toronto band Respire deliver a post-hardcore tour de force on the largest scale possible, orchestrally rich and incessantly uncompromising. Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 6, 2021