IS THE AFTERLIFE LONELY TOO?
Outside of Kantian space and time, do you miss dancing
in dusty basements where sex was once phenomenal?
How sunlight threads in morning frost, breath pluming
in knots between you and the snow-marbled fields?
When depression knocks, do the dead hide inside
poems, in the corridors between stanzas, curling fetal
in a b’s womb? (Are you here, now?) When the dead speak,
do words signify perfectly with presence? Does each
sentence sound like a symphony? Or appear in the mind’s
eye in 4k imagery? Have you ever walked across the surface
of a star? Are they as lonely as they look in my city sky?
Do you dream of microwaves beeping? Or reading Kafka
whose words are black scars? What do the dead think about
after the afterglow, if no one’s breathing? Don’t you miss
feeling, feeling, feeling? And failing, the soul search that
follows, from which you promise yourself to be reborn?
Author’s Bio
Yusuf Saadi’s first collection is forthcoming from Nightwood Editions (April 2020). His writing has appeared in journals including The Malahat Review, Brick, Best Canadian Poetry 2019, and CNQ.