oving day, and I should have faced this dawn,
should have swaddled myself in armour and rose,
a warrior, from this bed where I, damaged,
lie as a lump beneath white linen,
a snowdrift, but colder.

As the home becomes house, I listen:
it grows bigger - you empty from it -
and him, my son with the dark eyes,
bristles in the hallway, all excitement.
You tell him to put shoes on.
He doesn't understand that you
haven't boxes big enough
to pack the absence of his laughter,
or any room to take
the empty space of where you were.
It's a broken family's husk, this house:
a void for my lone echoes.

What will I do when you go?
I'll wage a war with memory;
overwhelm myself;
try to empty boiling oceans with a thimble.
I'll clench my heart, I'll bare my teeth at God;
I'll drink: twice my weight in bad tequila.
I'll walk, hunched, wild eyes open to the stinging wind
so I can hide the truth in crying;
I'll go unshaved for seasons,
howl at mountains I can't move, and,
jaw set, set firm as a statued-Greek,
I'll cold-store all expression.
It's in this way,
this way, that I'll go about the world, insane with grief,
swinging clubs at the head of each new morning
until I tire of fighting, to return
to this same bed,
here, where we read aloud and laughed,
broke the bread of life,
made love like savages,
and pledged eternities.
But for now, for now I'll hold my place,
right here, right here where I, damaged,
lie as a lump,
a lump beneath white linen,
a snowdrift, but colder. 

hursday. Soft light. The motherlode.
Sheets of absurdity rain down in
clumsy torrents -
silence bends each rule
of acoustics.
Hands are too soft
to pick it up.
All this sharp grief.
All this grief that spins
a virile web through
the doorways; the hearts;
beneath foundations -
a pounding tapestry;
a garotte for the
unctuous air.

This silence isn't.
Frozen polyphony,
idling for the multilayered thaw
of another grey day,
washed in tomorrow's same grey tub.
color-drained, bleached of meaning:
it's not silence -
this hibernating sound -
an ear to a wall declares
there is always something
gasping,
some small sound given
to something that should
be unheard of.

Silence.
The last bankrupt vein
has been fed; the last girl,
beaten;
the last vile name
sleeps in a violent breath.
4am and it peals
from the carpets
and the bedsprings,
and the spot outside the door where
the man, machete depleted,
lay bleeding. Everything screams -
quietly.

The line's end.
Too numb
to be terrified. 

he schizophrenic is
pregnant.
Her belly is full
of onions, and zombies,
and wild laughter.
Soon it will move,
and dark ideas will
scuttle on insect legs
through her mind,
scratch like small beasts
in the corners, incessantly;
grow larger;
howl for attention.

She's up there talking now,
to God, and Beethoven,
and the thrift-store
ottoman -
asking who the father is;
after Einstein's health;
why she hunts for angels
in the dumpster.

In the dark, two floors
down, her questions hit
with blunt force trauma.
I, too, have questions
for Him, but hold
my ghetto back.
Upstairs, the answers
stringtogether,
mingle,
make imperfect
sense to her and her
paper daisies.