Fall 2010 | Volume 4 | Issue 2

David Svenson

Poem on a Jumper and Witness

This feels so real. Just like last week, when I was alone, when you were out of town, oh I was falling so fast I could have beaten the rain drops but I knew it wasn’t real because I would never have been falling out of a building dressed like that—I mean, in my pajamas? But this is so much nicer, together, I’m wearing that dress that you love so much to peel off me. It’s like a date. It’s like we’re skipping work together for a secret breakfast where we’ll meet and pretend it’s serendipity, our chance of falling together in a dream, maybe we’ll float, that’d be nice, past all these windows we look out of every-day: there goes the copy room where you first kissed me, you shouldn’t have at work, we really shouldn’t have, but I fell for you — this dream must be a metaphor — you’re squeezing my hand so tightly. Maybe you’re squeezing me in our bed, the touch manifesting in this dream. Maybe when I wake you’ll be there so close, maybe we’ll go out for breakfast, right after we hit, as I hit the alarm.

it was like a blue, uh, like a real royal blue coat and it, she just came down, um, kinda straight, head first, with, uh, another guy holding her hand, and, uh, that’s the one that that I can remember, she, uh/hm, yea, she, they looked really, um, when they did come down, though, I don’t know I just watched them, I couldn’t take, just watched them come down, and they would, eh, the speed at which they came down was so fast, I’ve never seen anything drop that fast it was like, you know, terminal velocity— whatever you call it — but it was like everything else flo-flies a lot slower than the bodies coming down they were dropping and you could tell when they came down but at that point I’d never, you know, you just figure, from where I was standing there’s a façade and they were dropping behind the façade, um, and, uh, you know they looked, they looked like they were at peace they didn’t look like, um, they weren’t flailing they weren’t yelling, they weren’t screaming, they were, uh, they were just floating, but fast