On Breathin - Remi Graves

[Larry Robinson]

On Breathing

I held mine, at a cash point
by the police station
when I saw her kneel to speak
on his level, a mother telling
her not yet three year old son you don’t
need to be scared, we’ve done nothing
wrong, him nodding like he could see
the shape of her lie, like life had taught
him already that fear is for surviving
and in his innocence the boy brought
me to the tight of my chest at the sight
of the men in bullet proof vests by their
hi vis van, I felt for the phone in my pocket
heavy as untaught history where there on a timeline
a man in Ohio can’t decide if a mask
is more dangerous than his own face—
   I want to live
   but I also want to live
—I’m trying to take one here to get a grip
on what I mean but it's everywhere and
messy, while my friend wastes his in polite
debate with a man who can’t fathom
a life without his invisible upper hand
and a few months before this, when I refused
to watch that video, I gasped for mine
between guttural sobs on the sofa and
a man in Hackney gasped for his on the hospital
bed when the doctor tried to switch him off,
saying he’d been on for too long, saying
the ventilator needed to go to someone
who had a chance at life, his wife fought
to her last for his, wouldn’t leave the bedside
until he could inhale without coughing
and lord knows it's hard to speak when
you’re trying to catch yours, and how is it that
we’ve been running out of ours and not stopped
running, we’ve been chasing ours and it seems
the world wants to knock the wind out of us and
as I write this now, with another tab open on
respiration and stress relief, two men hover
in the sycamore outside my window, paid to cut
down the thing that’s been quietly, unequivocally
helping me inhale/exhale, this ordinary act
made sacred under the impossible weight
of a world that won’t tend to its wounds and
what becomes of a poem that’s run out of air
but refuses to end?

	- Remi Graves