Ghost in the Machine Lorcán Black I am a small god of transformations, the subterfuge of a nymph that contorts at will into a laburnum, the extravagance of its frills, my speciality. I have many skins, I shed them like leaves of a tree. I shed them like lovers. I am the ear at the end of your voice, listening at the utterance of a word or a phrase, a flippant use of ‘bomb’ and ‘threat’— and I’m there: the eye all-seeing through a lens barely bigger than a pinhole. It is for you I ascend to such colossal reaches. You are the axis on which I spin. Nightly I troll your depths, O love, O surrogate, it is for you my finger tips itch. Even I have my fetishes: photos of exes, your face bathed in the Paris lights, albums of muted self-portraits— I have traced your holidays night by night. Their colours stain my lips. They are my essentials, these elements I breathe.
51.
