Reading of the poem “Futures,” written in 2008 by Mackenzie Leigh Whitehair, and recorded under the moniker Sentimental Lady in 2010.

In your mind,
the cold metallic drip
of rusty faucet consciousness
streaming like
a foreboding infection
whose timing is never impeccable,
and always awkwardly
and harshly ironic.

Hit the lights.

Endure the flickering
violence of fluorescence,
that burns like
the pale yellow sun in your soul.

Now in your room,
in your oblique need,
the esoteric glow of the day
perpetuates a
state of waking in you.

Then, should it be a
vaguely autistic sufferance you carry,
you shall love with
the subtlety of
gossamer, angel’s wings.

Desperately telling yourself that
all things must come to pass
in the virtuosity
of your breathing,
which will at once,
suddenly and simultaneously,
become an extension of both Heaven and Hell
(Good and Evil);

the divinity of this day,
of the next,
sleeps within your own desire.

Now, now, in your room,
in your growing need,
hope becomes a
ghost-like silhouette of
things passed
eternally lost
and of all futures to come.

(It’s too much
we’re
never going to
be here
again.)