A Bit of Poetry

A Brief Report On The Epidemic of Living

I love you says the man who runs upstream
at five in the morning yelling for help.

I love you, she says and you try to shake it
off, but you realize that the shouldertip
is broken. Before the sunrise, you are an antelope.

Brownian motion, they say—move around the room,
searching for a light source closer than Venus.

Move around the room and you might still
hear the kiss of a shadow with wings, levitating
slowly. Some call it Providence or Progress

but we both know it’s my dead brother, feeling
inside of my chest for his own flesh and marrow,
light-headed bones, all things that exist but we cannot

explain to the cynics. We are stereoisomers,
I told you, molecules made of the same atoms
but mirror images of each other—

we shine polarized light in opposite ways,
so that when I wake up with the hunger of poems
bouncing in my stomach like hydrophobic stars,

you are sleeping in North Dakota, Wyoming, Arizona
trying to understand what makes us hollow boned
and brittle. Cynicism, I tell you, it’s like arsenic,

vinegar, salt and humoral immunity: we ingest
sarcasm like arsenic, like the kings, slowly building
a resistance to poison, slowly pressing their ears

against their beating chest, watching it slowly gain
electric bile in the heart, refusing to believe that there is

a cure for splitting the atom (the residues of this
experiment are too much for them to consider. What
happens when you split an atom? There’s nuclear
waste, radioactivity that leaves our soul burning alive).

The world isn’t built for us, you’d tell me, and I’d say
You’re lovely, like the aurora. You have a lovely, heavy heart,

and he kept a knife by the bed and told you it was sharp.
He kept hitting the walls and told you next time
it’s going to be your face. And you stayed, your heart
trying to go on by building mathematical models.

It would be easy to end our story here, a heartbeat skipping
but there are things that we cannot avoid, you and I, some
too dark and too obscure to be told as a bedtime story.

You go on, Rimbaud must have left his fingers in the sand—
he must have kept that inkstone of light around,
churning in his guts when he stopped writing at nineteen.

you are 27 and lost in the center of all centripetal
forces and gravity, your own soul counteracting them,
the poets are telling you about the Spanish inquisition,
begging for another color of paint and antibodies.

The world isn’t for us, you repeat. You’ve got to jump
into water sources with your hypocrisy hung from a tree.
You’ve got to have the sarcasm and the poems rewritten.
Yes it is, yes it is. I’m telling you, move around the room
and try to find my missing heart.