infine suspension

SPOKEN-WORD POEM

I.
Who deserves to wake up more?
The driver who had the wheel in his hands
or the passenger with all the grand plans?

The drunk teenager or the misleading brother
who bought her all the drinks?
Death considers all this as he thinks

about all these pairs of people,
suspended in the night sky amongst the stars.
This driver and this passenger in a field of broken cars.

II.
Death floats around them,
his long fingers lacing through their hair
collecting every little dream and dare

and delusion that could put them back on earth.
You see, these dreams have to be mighty grand
for Death to be able to understand

that it is worth them returning,
even with the guilt that Death must find
and plant deep within their mind.

III.
Death is no stranger to guilt,
having toyed with various victims of the nightly
road his patch of sky shines so brightly

upon, being perfectly alive to see absolutely
everything that happens and stays
to the ones he puts back. Some days

things get too hard and people break
as the one he keeps in the sky
somehow breaks the one he returns. Why?

IV.
Why is this the case? It’s as if the
withholding is the part that hurts the most
not remaining in the sky with Death too close.

Then what must Death do? Plant the seed of
guilt within them or hang them out to wait,
suspended from how their actions collided with fate?

As Death deliberates, the families pace beneath him
Next to their little girl or only child, praying on their knees, 
just wake up - please.

They’ll do almost anything.
They would give the whole wide world just to see the white
in the open eyes of their children struck by night.

And that is why Death tries to wake them up.
The guilt will not be bad this time,
he tells himself, they will be fine.

V.
But I will not, he realises.
For Death is nothing more
than a sad old man without anything in store.

An invisible old man suspended in the sky,
above a little patch of night that reflects his mistakes
that is waiting for the day when he, too, breaks.

He wonders what the sky is like for those
who jumped off cliffs or tried to fly
whether it is anything like his sky.

He would rather not feel at all but
some cruel twist of fate makes him choose
day after day between twos and twos,

between the driver and the passenger
as long as the stars are beside him
which fate decided to make forever.

And so he sends down the passenger like he almost always does.
Because the guilt of having done the deed
is almost always worse than planting the seed

or so he tells himself. But infinity is long,
the sky is wide, and the people in pairs
keep on coming up his black night stairs.