Lorcán Black

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.

This the litter of intimates on which my sticky fingers prick themselves.

Like a pool through which the sky lovingly reflects itself, I am the mirror through which your psyche bends itself day after day, unknowing.

Knowledge is an opiate into which I dissolve, essential as salt.

You will not even know me at the other end of my screen, untraceable as a black sky, mining your data of infinites—

dark mirror scrying for only your face.