Cockpit Voice Recorder
Poet: Germain Canon
The engines died
The city went quiet, collapsing
behind a million curtains
smothering every sound
Inside for weeks
I can't feel the floor drop
I drop along in thick atmosphere
howling round the edges of the bedroom
as it glides down the curve
at unknown airspeed
Under the sheets I breathe
and listen to the pilots last words
from cockpit voice recordings
I found online and play
in repeat
"Which way are we flying?"
"I don't know"
"I have no idea which way is up"
"I don't know either"
"Upside down?"
The rain crackles on the windowpanes
at increasing pace, the joints in the wall creak
under sudden changes of pressure
We must watch the state of the air between us
Mom and Dad say, their voices cut
through their computer microphone
I was never one for hugs anyway
but I touched Dad's hand once
and it was warm
and that is a fact.
"This cannot be happening"
"But what is happening?"
Every time the audio track stops
right when the ground hit
But I have to know what to say
when flying blind without feeling the stall
because everything around falls together
in impalpable gravity.
Germain Canon was born in Belgium in 1989, where he studied painting and architecture. After working in Brussels, he moved to Taipei in 2014, where he works as a visual artist and architect. He is part of the Taipei Poetry Collective, and uses writing as a narrative and poetic framework for his practice