Lost Control Again, 2025

I was alone in the gallery when the lights surrendered,

a small electrical death rattle,

breaker box coughing its last mechanical prayer,

while Joy Division leaked from the speakers

like prophecy disguised as bassline.

I mistook it for ambience.

I mistake most warnings for ambience.

Ian Curtis repeating himself in the dark,

as if saying it again

and again

could staple the body back to the voltage,

and then the room complied.

Blackout.

The kind of black that swallows the architecture of your hands.

The kind that remembers you are sixteen feet in the air balanced on a rented machine.

I laughed.

Or something inside me did.

The waveform on Unknown Pleasures,

those skewed white ribs,

always looked like a heartbeat refusing its coffin.

That night the coffin sparked.

The pulse jumped species.

Electricity became instruction.

I build space for other people’s revelations,

hang their ghosts at eye level fifty eight point five to center,

calculate lumens like a minor god of surfaces

and the grid said enough.

The space failed me on purpose.

A small divine interruption.

A reminder that if I won’t turn it off

it will turn itself off.

So I kept the charred altar.

Cradled the dead panel like a saint’s bone.

Painted the tremor back into it.

Inserted Ian into the wound.

Made the failure function again.

To mark the hour the lights went out.

To honor the overload.

To lose control

and call it power.