Keats, September 1820

When I wake up, he is coughing into the sheets beside me. He sleeps- if sleeping it can be called, that agonizing roil of twisted sheets and stabbing pain. He sleeps through his tearing coughs, and I can read the end in the reams of paper ripped from his lungs. In smudged, imperfect typewritten letters I see the neat, businesslike scalpels coming to sever the final cords of flesh that hold his spirit to his body. I can close my eyes and bleed my tongue. I can circle his bony wrist with my hand in an effort to keep his soul.

But when I wake up, he is coughing.

Thin and aching, the thought sings through my head like a stream of golden chemical, gently eating away at the soft tissues. He is going, he is going. Softly, softly, my mind turns to a bright lake of acid. At night, at his side, I can sleep myself into heedlessness, stroking his wasted head- bearing his children, growing old, dying beside him in bruising dreams.

But when I wake up, he is coughing.

In the daytime, when he is not made vulnerable by his bare chest and dropped defenses, I can sleep myself into forgetfulness, walking quietly with him, talking as if nothing is wrong. Grey drops of mercury rain onto his mobile lips from the clear sky, and I can ignore it during the day, when he dresses in black, makes a hard, glossy black shell of life around himself. His palms leave black stains on everything he touches- on my hands, on my neck, on his fork, on the banisters. He is vital. He is black as ink. His teeth cling to daytime like a starving wolf, and I’ve always believed what he says.

But when I wake up, he is coughing.

The morning comes like a crack of light, the only light that can show me how things really stand. Like the dawn of creation, an empty planet where clear vision is possible. The world from space, when the sun begins to cut it’s way out from behind the circle of planet. Death casts a fuzzy shadow across the curve of planet when the first breaking light of the sunrise snaps over the horizon. I turn my head on a pillow of choking feathers, brush clear my eyes, and look at him. His bare white skin. His chains of eyelashes. His black hair like needles in his scalp. His heavy, grey lips, parted raggedly over the words of death, imperfectly typed on thin white paper. I can close my eyes and cling to his living body and forget that the spirit inside is being severed into death.

But when I wake up, he is coughing.