when it comes to you, this poem is just compost. all my words claw around you like naughty dogs. what I want to write is that you really noticed things. I still remember the soft sound of yr heel turning as you walked towards a bush to inspect a bird’s nest every morning. I write abt yr hands as baby birds because of the way they parted the branches. yr voice when you said look. you showed me that apathy was the worst type of armour. that in every moment there is a baby bird. my psych says on the phone, I sense a deep sadness inside of you. remembering you keeps the wound open. don’t forget that wounds are prone to infection. you grew up surrounded by rainforest. the last time I was at the movies before lockdown, I watched an Apichatpong Weerasethakul retrospective. so much rainforest on screen. I love his films because I think they show how haunted nature can be. in the sense that rainforests feel like the overlap of the living and the dead. have you ever looked into a rainforest directly? Apichatpong Weerasethakul once said in an interview: when we close our eyes, of course, we see darkness. but if we stare at this darkness long enough, we will see something… a mind from one world adjusting to another world. every time we go back, the rainforest gets smaller and smaller, beaten back by a glut of palm oil plantations. we used to mourn in nature but now we mourn it. sometimes when a crow dies, other crows will gather around and tear its feathers off. which is goth as fuck. grief is its own aspect ratio, narrowing and widening to its own beleaguered logic. Darian Leader writes abt using a frame to relocate one’s experience of loss. I google the world’s biggest frame. it’s in Dubai and 150 metres tall so, it’s still too small. my friend Anita asks me if I’ve heard of the start-up term valley of death. the language of money is always a breath away from the language of death. some things don’t die. jellyfish. hydra. amaranths. lobsters… not really. they literally grow too big for their shells. their whole lives are a process of shedding shells and struggling into new ones. lobsters eat their old shells. locked in cycles of consumption and growth until they die of exhaustion. Anne Boyer wrote mortality is a gorgeous framework. like all frameworks, it’s subject to collapse. a man in New York fell into a sinkhole filled with rats for half an hour. in an interview afterwards, he says that he couldn’t scream because he was afraid that the rats would enter his mouth. it must have felt like years. it’s been four years since you died. it’s rude how time is a construct. the impulse to preserve may be equally as rude. a mortician attributes the popularity of embalming in America to something called a grief bond. it’s hard to swallow change in a swamp of tragedy. sometimes we make phone calls to assert our mutual aliveness. John Durham Peters refers to communication as a disclosure of being. in 1925, an article in The Washington Post considered the possibility of a radio broadcasting the dead’s voices and whether the dead vibrate at a lower rate. I’m writing this poem to say something to you……………………………...