maelstrom

 

this impossible sky

 

this exact moment

 

a woman locked in her home for

twenty years, or pollock

dead for fifty

 

said he couldn’t see the light,

eyes wide open, middle

of the afternoon, and then

the north tower fell

 

can you accept the fact

that reality happens without you?

 

jesus christ

 

i turned away for just a second

and next thing i knew

i was 40

 

i was married and then divorced and

the treetops were a shade of green beyond

the limited grasp of words

 

the sun was everywhere

 

was everything

 

thought for the hundredth time

about driving away,

but the children were crying

 

the truck was in the shop

 

this exact moment, you see

 

the shadows of houses stretched to

their breaking points down quiet streets

 

the shadows of birds held trembling

in my cupped hands

do you see why poetry is a

dead-end option?

 

do you understand the amount of

pain you’ve caused the

people you love the most?

 

religion is what matters, not the

worship of false gods invented by

cynics and power-hungry whores

 

we need to breathe,

we need to eat,

      need to accept the

inevitability of tragedy

 

we are sick with laughter as the trigger

is pulled, a man murdered on the

steps of a church, a dog beaten by

laughing children until it bleeds from

its eyes, and i remember being

blind on the afternoon you finally

broke your 20 years of silence

 

i remember the future

in no uncertain terms

 

in your absence, i

learned to invent you

 

a game of course, which means one of

us wins and one of us loses

 

a target painted on the back of a man

who believes in something more

than words printed on chap paper

 

an impossibly sky

 

blue without remorse,

and my hands are numb

 

are cracked and bleeding, and i

watnted to tell the story but

i couldn’t remember the ending

 

the children were asleep

 

figured it was best just to

back out of the room quietly