Nativity Scene in Bullet-Time

If this is a fracture across time and place, where past and future hold each other’s gaze, then should the world not call a moment’s halt, not hang like a fly-cloud at head-height when a downpour ends? Should it not let fireworks burst, then hold their sculpted light? Then we will see the glory of this wild, this liberated city, where everyone is held in green, red, gold of roman-candle arcs and rocket seed-heads. We walk among the rescued in their newly crowded bars. A couple caught mid-kiss across their table, waiter balanced on one foot with eyes of steel and arms of plates. A self-appointed prophet in a shirt and tie gapes, fish-like, caught halfway through a lie. I could lean and wet my fingertip in stilled champagne, tilted on a singer’s lip. You could grab a smoke ring from the ether between punters and the pole dancer, pocket it as proof, then we could take the air beside the float-glass river, where a busker rests her bow on a string, and you ask what are all these flesh-ghosts thinking? Far from a cheap trick, this city-wide hiatus, the cost per minute is prohibitive. We barely linger in this midnight space before words rush back, before kiss meets kiss.