Black Wine

Adam Bignell, November 2025

Red Wine, in certain light, appears black.

Sweet tar, sweet oblivion,

I'll share the amniotic fluid with you.

Bashing our heads against tile,

you'll fall, too.

You won't be able to tell when the rubber hits the road.

There'll be no jerk to indicate purchase,

only transactions conducted in exotic tongues,

ciphered in plain banality,

by those who know

you don't have the patience for algebra.

Animal fat and halogen lights.

The first suicide on the ISS was captured by low orbit livestream,

and televised to virtually everyone.

Antigens in antigravity, really in constant free fall,

the drops of plasma bounced around like snooker balls in the accelerated sunset.

I'll admit, I thought of John Dalton before the astronaut's family.

Then the station slipped, weightless, into the Earth's shadow.

What better place to die?

In the still silence, you can almost make believe you're not hurtling forward at 28,000 kilometers per hour.

But you're frankly ballistic.

Meanwhile, an archosaur lies below,

in the buzzing carboniferous heat, smothered in muck.

At 3 beats per minute, it's barely alive.

For a time, we were worried that the titanium debris might strike it, and finally kill it in earnest,

but it lands elsewhere in the bog.

The splash is calamitous but the archosaur is unstirred.

It's patient. Calamity after calamity, starving gazelles.

It has millions of years ahead, still.

2 beats per minute, then.