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Tell me what to do when green grass
nips at your ankles like little beasts.
No one at the gas station checks their blind spots,
every fat heart safely cramped, somehow
or somewhere, in lackluster fingers.
I watch raindrops straggle and falter.
It was always me versus the sky,
a one-way street.
When it yawns open, where will I be?
Still in the room where we slept, the pain
packed into one ineffable corner like a stack
of broken furniture?
Unmoving caterpillar, fake masochist,
I loved you waking up
the most, eyes wispy and luminous,
knowing no other home.
Years later, the red continues to bite.
Odd flecks of your nail polish
pierce twilight like tiny fire trucks.
Today unfurls only by way of my brute belief.
I will fall forever like this,
generic in my mourning, drenched
in the sleep-silk of time.
You said I wouldn’t know death if it reared its mighty legs
and kicked me. But the way you study yourself
in the mirror hasn’t changed. Nothing alive about that.
Hordes of flies fling themselves at the screen door.
It flaps in the wind like a stuck bird.
Everything’s a church now, isn’t that lovely?
Even me on my knees, reversing leather to hide.
Even the dead ants, suspended in orange juice.
Once, I wore Demonias to a funeral. Which proves
we move mostly towards the light that rebukes us.
Some crosses just beg to be carried, what else
am I to do?
We pile in a black car to go somewhere, the same
as nowhere. Little pouches of jerky, pills for the trip.
Tissues so dainty they leave their own trail.
And when the going gets tough?
I’ll let the phone ring out to hear his voice.
The faint whisper promised it wasn’t
too late. Still they dragged the faith
from you like a soft animal’s innards.
You’re sitting on the phone, one hand clamped
over the weeping slash you call a mouth.
The same worn blade steps up, does its duty.
A routine checkup with a white-dot x-ray.
How quickly mundane can mean fatal.
Where to go when you’ve already toured
the bowels of mercy, came up half-starved,
hands as empty as ever?
That boy with the bouquet of roses is
biking to a grave. You know from the way
his unscathed legs piston, incandescent
under a slow departing light.
