Breathing Through The Famine

If I carve myself into a drafty idea

will that bring you back. 

If there’s less of me will there be

more of you. I buy tiny mass

produced glasses of tiramisu.

Lemon’s in scrapes I don’t remember

riving. Caramel apple snacking cake’s

the dulled teak of your eyes. 

I take a new pill called Antigrief

and long walks to the door

of the ward in my mind where 

I keep a ledger, a scale, a knife.

Do I want to pare down to the child

who could have saved you 

or is your absence the only way I feel

day unfurl on my shoulders. 

I need a machine to breathe and

there are fewer for the pestilence

that suffocated countless just

before you 

yourself. Tomorrow I’ll be 

straining toward the form

of prayer that’s a wave of starlings

sizzling into a powerline

when sunset overreddens their wings

and the sky’s too bloody for its frame.

I blame myself for keeping you in

my body. I should keep better

appointments. At 4:48 every morning

a halogen headlight like radioactive pine

needles my window, and I look out

as the first gray crowd, bleared and puffy,

sets out toward its ward. It’s the point 

in the rhythm of day when they all

start breathing. I stop 127 times per hour.

Can’t sniff a flower, for the allergies, for

its tampering with my small nostrils and

the adrenaline to my heart, every 2 seconds

to wake me and stop my coffining, so when

you couldn't stop coughing did you think

it was better not to be seen, on the ground,

gasping for the son who never reached for you.

The Joys Between Them

There are men made lost

who before the last drop

cling to any body as a home.

I think they’re happier.

Their joy doesn't need to cool

to be tenable. They don't need

to wait for the day they're infallible

to take a shot at splendor. 

I live inside the breakage

between wanting to be 

and wanting to be held back.

Inside, I live like heldness 

in an underripened quince.

In, under, I break for men I've lost

and I’m the man whose joy's

between them. I embody the shot

between and feel that life, ripe

and open, waiting for a day 

a quince is lent to me, a shot

at feeling held and holding, happier.