tora
said sorrow is easy and
then i showed you how
said lennon is dead said
d boon is dead said
cobain is dead and it was only
your face that changed and it was
only your name
it was winter
it had always been winter
a tired furnace in a
drafty house
the color blue but smudged,
dirty,
faded at the edges and you
took off your clothes,
said you were tired,
lay down naked on the ice
said you were bored and then
asked when i was
going to take you back home
after the age of enlightenment
not alone and not
dead, which is something
ask creeley
ask diane
play your copy of disintegration
until the walls no longer matter,
until the bright january
sky is all you can see
be yourself
despite the fact that
it’s not enough
stand in the field where
beauty comes to die
feels so goddamned good just
breathing that you can’t imagine
what it will be like to
finally stop
all hope edged w/ frost
and not warm yet and still the
scars and still the ghosts
shadows of empty buildings laid out
across the snow and frozen mud and the
song of light is only in your mind
the women weep at the river’s edge
the baby is passed from one to the next
not war and never peace and
these is nothing worth dying for in this world
but it’s always been so easy finding
reasons to kill
eagle flies up to the sun
man pulls the trigger and
brings it back down
boy sleeps in his bed of flames
while his mother drives away
nothing to do but map out all of
this hatred and pain and
hope that your own children can
find their way home
a gift, belated
rain down ghostwhite walls, all
static all fear just waiting for the roof to fall,
said take my hand, said slower
but the children were gone
the lies all made sense
spoke each one like a bitter mantra
until my mouth filled with blood
watched christ in his agony and
then cobain, and i remember my father
telling me that it wasn’t WHO you
hated that mattered but WHY
i remember his house on
the morning he died
the shadow of falling snow across
dirty windows, and she said
none of this matters if i love you
she held her mirror up to
the sun and laughed
felt strange when the
moment of joy refused to fade
this sentimental bloodletting
down decker ave past the
face of christ past the liquor store
and the boarded-up laundromat to mary’s
old apartment where we thought we
were in love,
where we knew it and then lost it in the
grey crush of endless frozen
afternoons
lost it down potholed streets and
beneath rusting bridges, spent 3 years
waiting for a summer that never came and
we had mercy and we had no god
we had no sunlight
no shadows
and then we lost the language and
then the music
lost each other but didn’t notice
or didn’t care
hurts more to admit it now
than it did back then
