absolute zero

1.

body found next to the body of her father,
her grandfather,
and if you close your eyes all
directions are the same

if you finally accept the idea
of death, all days can be numbered
backwards down to zero

all questions can be answered with the
suffocating weight of silence

2.

told him he was no
one’s son then left him hanging
there three feet above his
children’s useless
bones

kept laughing about the expression
he’d had long after the idea
of someone else’s despair had
stopped being funny

3.

afternoon of pale sunlight,
of ice melting by slow degrees, and
she said to me or i said to her
but despair is easy
and i remember that one of
us laughed

remember that the temperature
dropped while we slept

meaningless patters of frost
tattooed across our flesh
when we woke up the next morning

4.

it was rain on
top of rain on top of
melting snow

it was the season of
anonymous suicides

cars endlessly up and down
shiny grey streets, bodies
found in fields of mud and
there was faith in god and
there was faith in money and
i had no use for either

there was warmth where our
bodies touched before
we pulled away from
one another

never quite felt like
the end of something
but it always was

5.

forgot to stand
motionless and so they
saw me without effort,
couldn’t shoot me enough
and i could only die once
but they kept trying,
just for fun