The Sobbing School, and Aubade with Insomnia

The Sobbing School

is where I learned to brandish the black like a club, you know, like a blunt object, or cobalt flashes of strobe dotting damp walls after dusk drops the dark motion our modern world can’t hold. There’s a process by which bodies blend in, or don’t, or die, or roll on past the siren’s glow so as not to subpoena the grave. Mama never said surviving this flesh was a kind of perverse science, but I’ve seen the tape, felt the metal close & lock around my wrists, bone bisected by chokehold. A crow turns crimson against the windshield & who would dare mourn such clean transition, the hazard of not knowing you are the wrong kind of alive. But enough about extinction. Entire towns mad with grief, whole modes of dreaming gone the way of life before lyric, all faded into amber & archive, all dead as the VCR, all buried below the surface where nothing breaks, bleeds.

Aubade with Insomnia

Are you a land inside the body? Or an elsewhere the body collapses, where it goes to prune

the imagination, that thick orchard of lights? Are you an especially stern vice principal, curing the hallway

of chatter? Is there a way back to between your borders yet unrecorded, a path without maps

or meds? Is there a language beyond language, that I might describe what comes before the stillness,

the staring upward for hours that pass like punches to the inside of the head? This is the most lonesome anguish,

I think, though any such distinction is blurry at best, counter -productive even, given the nature of our moments together,

how solace, a mangy fox, always slips from presence to memory without leaving a note, not even to say,

I miss the way your breath comes & goes.