Ghosts (Homage to Burial)
By Emily Berry
A statistician would say: of all the millions of ghost stories ever told, what percentage would have to be true for ghosts to exist? The answer is that only one story would have to be true.
—Burial
You can invest everything in someone. This one feeling chopping you up. Anyone can go into the night. I just want to be gone. I want to be unknown. There’s a storm coming. Euphoria trapped in a vial ... I was once in these mountains, the middle of nowhere. I used to get taken away. A lot of things were wrong, cold things, bad things. The weight of the decisions in you. You’d see these fires. Someone upset on the other side of the world. It’s like a Ouija board, it’s ... the devil’s face in their eyes, that feeling like a ghost touched you, like finding a body in a lift shaft on the other side of the night, even if you fight to see it, you’ll never see anything. I love rain, safe haven. Deserts, forests, people. I just want to be a symbol you alone could hear. Someone in your head. Everyone knows those sorts of feelings. When there’s nowhere to go, tearing through an empty building, the image of where you just were still on your retina. If you talk about it, it just sort of disappears
Source: Poetry (January 2020)