"FOR THE RECORD"
by Iain Deans

Send the books over the event horizon and pause
as they stretch through time
I am tired of the rumours, the celestial bureaucracy
corrupt as barbed wire,
I have a job to do, orders are orders, and gravity
delicately twists all verbs anyway

Crack of electricity, imagined of course, windless tundra
and all that, in the script someone wrote “void” and I
crept under the table with your empty notebooks – and now
they erupt - particles of snow that snap
out of this universe

The mathematics running through the pulleys is quite
something, and in this situation one still thinks of
protocol, of a fit of questions,
it was autumn when we last talked.

This is my insult, perfected, polished: solid chrome hate.
Louder than tabloid indignation this little miracle of
intensity right here in my pocket: for the record it’s been
a heck of an anchor, the volume of spectral radiation in
front of me bending

into great seashells of information; I always loved your
descriptions of traffic in disintegrating cities: how many
are killed by celebratory bullets that arc into a strangely
satisfying doom, the way your memoirs

now drift away from my fingers: cold projectiles in a lurid
theoretical equation.

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