Kissing, Still by Pat Foran
after David Bowie’s “Heroes”
This we know: A wall is.
A kiss is.
And we are kissing still.
We hear the drone of a slip cover of a song. Your song.
We think: How it shudders, this song, how the wall does — the wall behind us, the one we lean on. The one between us. The one you don’t mention. How you saw us kissing, and heard the could in it, the hypnotic urgency in it. In us.
We see you, we see the throne, your throne, a throne that isn’t. We think: The urgency isn’t. The could isn’t.
You say: “We could be …”
We wonder: We ‘could’?
You say: One day.
We think: What is a ‘day’?
You say: Forever.
We think: Is.
And screw the majesty of this song, why don’t you? We love the drone, but fuck the words. Especially the H word.
The wall behind us — the one we lean on, the one between us — is.
We are and this is.
And we are kissing still.
Is means no words, is means no labels. Is means no song, not even in the crumpled heart you hold in your cosplaying hands.
We are not ever we are not never we are not were not even for one day. We are.
Everything is. The wall. The world. This moment. The wish for could, the wish for will.
Nothing is possible. Nothing is certain. It just is.
Is isn’t a day. Is isn’t a life. Or a war. Or a world. Or a love.
Is is.
You see us up against the wall and we are kissing.
You plead, plead as if possibility lived, lived in Topeka, Kansas, in a bungalow built on stilts, built on hurt and half-full hopefulness, brigadooned into your color-splash heart as you lament the loss of something that could be, a thing that actually already is. And still we are kissing.
You paint a mood the color of the most disharmonious of walls, the most felonious of fables, and we are kissing.
You are on your last legs, your last breath, your last love, and we are kissing.
You are living and not living, and we are kissing.
The fable falls, the wall tumbles, and we are kissing.
This we know: The sun does not rise, the crestfallen moon does not see a way out, the radio-silent love of the saddest of hearts does not remember. Every moment a murmur, each beginning a bargain. And we are kissing. Still.
Author's Note:
I don’t know that I consciously practice it. But when I do, something (intuition? the art of imaginary motorcycle maintenance? the coolest of cats?) compels me to practice it. To get out there (out there as in outside, under an upside-down-egg-carton sky or ‘neath the pale moonlight … out there as in trancing-out-into-Alpha out there .. or out there as in out with the handful of beings who make me feel better about being alive) when I feel as in feel I need to. When I feel. That’s also when I write: when I feel.
Sometimes, Pat Foran thinks about a song, a song that was a kiss from can to can’t. His work has appeared in various journals. His (mostly) flash fiction collection Songs from the Blimp Ruins was published in 2026 by Silverbacked Punk Press. Find him at neutralspaces.co/patforan/, Bluesky at @pdforan.bsky.social and Instagram at @pdforan.
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