The Glo Number You Are Calling opens with a recorded message on an answering machine, and that message and machine become the grounding anchor of the spoken word poem.

The Glo number you have dialled is unable to answer. That simple phrase is familiar, the kind of automated message we have all heard and ignored. But Archangel uses this mundane thing, repeated, as an entrance into the life of Derrick.

The first caller is his younger sister. She calls partly to tell him that he was wrong. Prom was fun. More importantly, he was wrong about the boy he warned her about, the one Derrick apparently thought would use her and dump her. Instead, they kissed under the moonlight and he told her that he loved her.

She teases Derrick about his sayings that are “insanely not so sane”. With this revelation, Derrick joins that league of tormented thinkers, from artists to scientists, people seemingly burdened by the iniquity of their own intelligence.

Perhaps that is too much to conclude from a sister teasing her brother, but Archangel begins to construct someone whose cleverness and darkness seem to live very close to each other. Derrick had planted seeds of doubt in his sister about true love. Never trust a man, he had told her, because men are all hungry. And isn’t that the way we use our own experiences to colour other people’s intentions?

We take the looking glass through which life has taught us to see and assume everybody else should look through it too. We label those who do not see what we see as naive. Derrick must have thought his sister naive.

They must have had a loving relationship because she teases him freely, and in explaining why she chose love she almost positions herself as his antithesis. Where Derrick sees danger, she sees possibility. She is even daydreaming about future nephews and nieces at prom. Take me back to teenage love.

With this, we see Archangel’s ability to enrich this gritty worldview with temptations of happiness. Prom. Moonlight. Love. Family. A future that has not happened yet. Then the mood shifts, and significantly so. Derrick has been talking about suicide. His sister hoped he was bluffing. She looked into his eyes expecting to see the joke, but what she found was:

What a way to describe this particular pain. The point at which living becomes bondage and death begins to masquerade as liberation. So much makes sense with the benefit of hindsight. In the moment, we miss things. We ignore them even. We convince ourselves that a joke is only a joke because taking it seriously demands more accountability from us. His sister had heard Derrick talk about death before. But this time, in his absence, those words have acquired another meaning. She begs him:

“If you have nothing to live for, live for me.” Live for Mum. Live for the nephews and nieces she will one day bring into the world. Live so she does not have to cry every time she tells them about her favourite troublemaker.

How ironic that troubled souls can make for the sweetest companions.

Click. The number is unavailable again. The second caller is a friend, and you can perceive the difference in this relationship. It is camaraderie, hot with the hustle. His philosophy is resilience, movement, achievement. Derrick said he would call in three days. It is now day four, but the friend almost dismisses the delay. Forget that side. Life continues. I wonder how this friend’s personality rubbed off on Derrick given his state of mind.

This is a man who understands the blood, sweat and tears of the hustling African. He sees the street soldiers who fall daily on the paved battlefield, but he has no intention of becoming one of them.

Time waits for no one, so why should we wait for time? His answer to suffering is endurance, while Derrick’s appears to be escape. Then, for all the friend’s confidence, Archangel allows a crack to appear.

Even this hustler, armed with all his certainty about resilience, eventually arrives at existential questions.

What is all this for? What becomes of everything we spend our lives chasing when there is no longer a life to possess it?

Archangel has this uncanny ability to draw us into his world without becoming preachy. The philosophy comes through people rather than lectures. By now, we have heard two people talking intimately about Derrick, but we still have not heard Derrick. We are becoming invested in privileged information about a stranger we do not know. Is this what it feels like to work at NASA? Signals are coming in. You can tell something consequential is happening somewhere, but information has not given you control.

Click. Still no Derrick. The third caller is his mother.

She sounds older, more philosophical and already seasoned with grief. Derrick’s father is dead. She describes that loss as half of her soul departing. Now she faces the possibility of losing her son too. Like his sister, she asks him to live for her. That tells us something important about this family. There is love here. Derrick is not presented as someone whom nobody cares about. His sister loves him. His mother loves him. His friend notices when he disappears. That suggests that sometimes people can be deeply loved and still be unreachable.

The mother introduces faith into the conversation. She asks about purpose. Why was man created? Why spend life chasing endless questions while leaving the right ones unanswered? Then she says:

Perhaps death would finally explain Derrick to the people who love him.

Perhaps the jokes would become warnings. The silences would become evidence. The strange things he said would suddenly make sense. But what cruel knowledge that would be. To understand someone only when understanding can no longer save them. Across these calls, Archangel quietly assembles different arguments for staying alive.

Derrick answers them all with silence. Until finally, we find him. He is standing on top of a skyscraper. Probably without having received any of these messages.

The answering-machine refrain mutates. The unreachable man is no longer simply somewhere away from his telephone. He is at an edge, listening to another voice telling him that the answer he seeks is at the bottom.

If only he leaps, everything will be revealed.

He hears the tearful hymns of fallen angels in the air and somehow knows:

I wonder what drove him to that conclusion. What kind of soul does Derrick believe himself to possess that there is no room for it here? What has happened inside a person for existence itself to begin to feel like rejection? What makes someone believe that even redemption has boundaries and somehow they have fallen outside them?

“The Glo number you just dialled is unable to answer the call at the moment, probably because he’s standing at the top of a skyscraper, mind deliberating whether or not to jump off it.”

Archangel moves swiftly through these lines, but they force us to stop even when the poem does not. That is part of why his poems linger. He leaves questions behind. Derrick closes his eyes. Raises his head towards heaven. Prays. And then comes perhaps the darkest collision in the poem:

Gravity apparently moves faster than prayer. He looks towards heaven while contemplating falling towards earth. He fears damnation while considering the act he thinks might damn him. Then he breathes.

And Archangel stops. We do not hear Derrick fall. We do not hear him step backwards either. We are suspended in our lack of omniscience, not knowing what happens next, whether he lives or leaps. For most of the poem, his sister, friend and mother have been trapped on one side of a telephone, speaking in his absence, not knowing what is happening at the other end.

At the end, Archangel puts us there with them. We have heard the calls. We have heard the fear. We have finally reached Derrick. And still, we do not know whether we got there in time.

Archangel does not resolve the torment of his titular character. He passes some of it on to us, and that is why this poem sparks so much thought, so much concern and conversation.

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