This moment before the spectacle is over. A
whatever feeling gravitating towards the center.
What sense is there when the sky is roaring?
Tonight, the moon shadowed by a jet. Our hands
still on the table and, somewhere in the wide night,
something happens.
What is it that you want to know about this story?
About the season and its late accessories. The tear
refracting light until you are an endless summer.
Obscurities and the angular drift of incoming rain.
I believe I can make something of my life, make art.
Your blood-warm cheek, now warming my chest.
Am I being selfish when I ask you not to die? Did
anyone tell us pain would be so ordinary? I
remember now, a time when I faced abstraction with
substance. Substances to allure another reason. Why
am I here? From this end of the poem, I’m asking
you to hold on.
Beyond the sky of loss, the jet is unarmed and
searching for the light strip. Beyond the fence of
living, the sky eats light and never feels full. Beyond
the fence of reason, I want to prove to you that I
lived and that we are living. Before the jet turns back
and crosses the moon once more.
Step outside and the chemicals are always there. I
hallucinate your perfume and wish you back. But it’s
the old season again—where the pigeons are heavy
with ash and the door to morning is a mouth of
smoke.
Reading my grandfather’s notebooks, I’m trying to
know madness as a way of searching. Is any
destruction minor? In so many ways, I am useless,
but I took midnight and made it brave. At least the
banging outside could be anything: fireworks, a cat
knocking over a trashcan, a car crash.
There’s still so much left in the wreckage of
language. Not entirely erased: the ghost of an I.
When I miss you reveals a new doorway. O, name
without knowing, you made it.