After Graduation

When I was nine,
dad used to play gamelan on radio and
he let the bronze chimes strike till ten
like chanting hammer and anvil bones
to an oracle I don’t believe in.
His father was a barrister and so was he
and he left the keys to his office
seven feet high on a kitchen rack.

Sometimes,
I would get a broom on my hand and jump and
whip them both till the keys were brushed by a tickle of hair
running with precise pressure. Other times,
he’d lend me his pens and papers and I would fire at it like a knife.
Dad didn’t even try to discourage me. I’d give anything
to rummage natural harmonics from that smirking copper,
at least for a time.

Today, I ran off with the car at his penultimate breath.
He was now a Chrome skeleton,
done away on the dusty floor, a mp3
embedded in his shortened span
with a rib of keys missing from the rack.

It reminds me of a time I was fifteen when he vacuumed our home,
when our living reverie was lost to a space of
screaming stars and scratched voices. He had set the bar.
We watched the stellar clouds pass from fluid to a mould
as metals of the past form the colours of the night.
We watched the iridescence of the sky vanish
when the youthful roads sweep behind.

They told me he passed in silence when I arrived.
No frown for keys mauled on the floor or smile
for an ancient lullaby leaked and drilled into my heart,
he knew his new house like the doors of his own.
When I left the crying place in the faceless world,
it wasn’t him that felt alone.