houses burn
my hand silhouetted
against a twilight
october sky
everything is skin
and bone
and silence
and somewhere else
houses burn
and the people inside
refuse to leave
i close my eyes
the child smiles
i don't have enough
magic
to save her
one after kahlo
she paints her suicide from
memory, the clouds, the shattered
glass, the broken body
she calls her ex-husband pig
and she calls him lover
and he laughs softly and
always in the arms of another woman
they have no children and
she paints this too, an
emptiness inside a blank expanse,
a sky without air, and she climbs
to the top of the canvas
she jumps
spends the last brilliant seconds
of her life naming stars
your enemy's momentum, your lover's god
the house cold
and the dogs hungry
and myself numbered among them
the slow eight of jesus christ
in a dark room
too much silence to sleep
one hundred eighty pounds of fear
and the baby breathing
the doors open
and the doors closed
and the ghosts of all the hands
that have ever held my own
i asked for none of this
i made no promises
do you believe in america?
look at this girl
tied to the bed
look at the man behind the camera
at the ones who approach her and
at what they hold in their hands
and i hate mirrors
for obvious reasons
i wait for the phone to ring
but it doesn't
and i have a name and i
have a number and
there was a time when i thought
they would mean something
there was a time when
the wars mattered
not how many died but
how quickly victory
could be declared
how much money could be made
all of the beautiful things
it could buy
dolorosa
midnight in the
house of the dying man and
there is nothing to eat
but darkness
there is nothing to
talk about but regret
the suicides you've known
or the bodies devoured by cancer
or the names of the soldiers
who drove the spikes
through christ
the names of their wives
and children
all of the ways that guilt
ends up bleeding into innocence
and no one wants to see
the killers as human
and no one wants to stand for
too long in the room
of mirrors
sooner or later
all you'll see is what
you've always hated most
in the age of gold
and the children in the ashes
and some of them playing
and some of them dead
some of them remembered and
others as lost
as the ghosts of aztecs
and there are
the hands of mothers and
there are the hands of strangers
and there is the way that
pain is pain
the way a father’s voice sounds
as the plastic bag is placed
over the head and
tied tight around the neck
the absolute fear when love
is proven to be worthless
none of us anything more
or less than human
