Honeysuckle Weeks on Anno Birkin

Who was Anno Birkin (1980-2001)?
It is something Anno often asked himself. Just before he died he scrawled that very question (similarly phrased but with an expletive inserted) in huge capital letters on the walls of the house he had been sharing with friends near Milan.

Anno, scion of one of Britain's foremost creative dynasties, belonged to a band called Kicks joy Darkness. In 2001, KjD were in Italy, working on their first album, when one night, in a thick fog, three of the four band members were involved in a freak car crash. Swerving to avoid a broken down car in the middle of the motorway, they crashed into a truck parked on the hard shoulder. Anno and his two bandmates were killed instantly.

Theirs is in essence, a story of life's randomness – young men living on the edge, pursuing a dream, relishing a world that was theirs to conquer. And in a split second, it was all over.

[Anno Birkin. Picture by LaurenticWave]

Yet with every life lost, no matter how short, there is a legacy. Despite being just a month short of his 21st birthday, Anno had already made his mark. He wrote poems – hundreds of them, in notebooks, on the backs of envelopes, on any scrap of paper that was to hand. Some of them became songs. Some of them were shared with the two great loves of his live, actresses Milla Jovovich and Honeysuckle Weeks.

To celebrate the publication of Who Said the Race is Over? in 2003, some of the woman in Anno's life we asked to choose one his poems, and tell us about the Anno they knew.

[No title]
I sat by myself past the bridge by the great white balloon,
          with my guilt by the great yellow moon.
This place where I ventured with fire and with fear
          of the devil's omnipotent moon.

And the wound in my heart bled into my brain,
and the wind blew the rain in my eyes,
and I though it was tears, and I cried at my being in love.
And I writhed in the light of the moon strung above -
          that lunatic moon hung above.

My senses were sharp!
And volcanic her lingering, luminous soul, we had rolled in
the raw light of manic delusions and danced like the dead.

Her head in my hands, like a spell, like a charm,
like a luminous psalm for my psyche, my arms are wrapped
tightly, and loosely enfolding the night
and the folds of desire that are tight round my throat,
and the music of madness floats on hind legs
through the dregs of my sunken serenity.

Do you trust me to cling to your word? For I do -
  every letter.
I'm better off burned by your fire than cold to the world,
         My desire.
            My earliest memory.

We're animals trying to be angels,
but we are not able to know without words;
yet we grow without known the verb, and we love without grammar.

[Summer, 2000]

Honeysuckle Weeks
Anno wrote this poem a week or so after I confessed that I loved him, which was a terrible position to put him in because at the time, I happened to be entangled with one of his oldest friends. We had known each other since we were 15, but later, love just sort of crept up on us. We found we wanted to spend all our time talking to each other.

He came to visit me at my house in Vauxhall Fields, and we bought tickets for a flight in the Vauxhall hot air balloon which used to be tethering outside my front door. I think what Anno was doing in the poem – and in life – was trying to separate the pure from the sordid. Like a lot of teenage boys, he felt guilty about his own desires and he tried to elevate them trough poetry.

I always had the feeling with Anno that I had to catch up – he had it all figured out somehow. Because he was so complete, so perfect, everybody wanted a piece of him – and now they can have it through his poetry. He still affects everything I think about, everything I do.

The Great White Balloon was taken down shortly after the London Eye opened. But there is still a rough patch of grass where the moorings used to be and I will never forget being 100 feet above London, floating on love and hot air.

Source.