Had we not
bullet in the head
been forced on top
of our neighbors’ corpses
in that festive
Ukrainian evening
Had we not
willing ourselves to forget
plunged
bottle deep
in spirits not our own
Had rape
not been the law
but mercy instead
Imagine
the songs we would have sung
the happy noise
scattered over bright chords
ecstatic leaps
and skiing madly
down the perfect slopes
of upturned breasts
under the thinness of silk
Went to bed early, for me, after a day of exhaustion
This darkness, I thought at one point,
either the black
that proverbially comes just before dawn
or a tasteless prelude to the darkness that goes on
as dark now as 1,000 years from now.
A fucker with a kennel of power tools
started barking under my window
a few hours later,
put an end to that right away
A packet of poems arrives in the box
I read them throughout a wasted day
during which, at one point in my paralysis,
I wonder about medication
medication I know to be a crock
based on false tests,
creating as much misery as it purports to cure
enriching powerful
multi-billion dollar snake oil operations.
In the poems a worldview
Amazing, really, since the poet is a kid
I find myself writing in the guy’s cadence
what next, that MacArthur I’ve been banking on?
Silence.
A graph, slipping inexorably downward into the infinite darkness of zero.
I am talking, but there is not a ripple, nor even a breath.
It comes to all of us, but that is hardly consolation.
