This one is entitled "White Dwarves," and it's for Chris.
I want to believe the Aztecs, that once you
eat the heart of a dragon, you can understand animal language.
I want to believe that Andromeda M31 is just a mirage.
Today, someone has been crying in the house across the street.
Someone is masturbating just up the road right now.
They sound the same to me.
We aren't that different from the cicadas or the century
plant.
All we do is die.
The sounds we push out into the universe
take their time to arrive.
Just yesterday, the radio waves we've been shooting out
into space since the '50s reached
the corner of our solar system.
Somewhere, a boy is just beginning puberty,
his bones mimicking the slow stretch of the universe.
When he speaks in his sleep, tonight he
won't notice the small crackling in his voice.
The new word grows old.
Time slips his hands in our pockets and laughs.
It happens again.
I started by writing, the story ends with your brother
Matt peeling the tabby from the pavement,
the skull crushed, the spots on its stomach little
constellations.
A name, the body milk warm.
He places it on the sidewalk, can't look at his date.
She says, I think that's my cat.
I think that's my cat, and knows.
Then lightning.
The long drive home, where you pass
the remains of a car with its passengers
burned to death inside.
A year of sleeplessness, night terrors, and waking to women
you don't love.
Your ex still possessing your bones.
This is an apology, because in Thailand, a monk
gathers boys for the sex trade and sells them to miserable
bastards here in the West.
Because Kamajors behead RUF soldiers in Sierra Leone,
and RUF cut off Kamajor hands and dicks, spike them on poles,
and parade the streets.
In China, poachers kill endangered tigers,
make Viagra from their bones.
You said, we are not here to be happy, and I agree.
This is what we do.
Drink alone at dive bars, reading Bukowski,
crying for the woman raped on the reservation who
can't tell her friends.
Once, you were so drunk you pissed on a stranger's lawn,
looking in through the window at the family.
Once, a brunette sat down at the table with us
and barked, where does this lead?
That poor woman.
If only the cat didn't have spots or she
hadn't seen it lying in the road.
If only her father hadn't died a week before, and maybe
if your brother had known just what to say.
Yesterday, someone smashed my car window,
but only stole a pair of shoes from the backseat.
Yesterday, you woke with a pain in your chest,
coughing up black phlegm, and afraid
your mother is going blind.
Look what we do to ourselves, slipping a chloroform
rag under our noses, lacing our love with PCP.
All we can do is survive, like the boy in the Syrian home
found days after an operation to retrieve corpses
from a massacre.
How he hid beneath the bodies of his parents,
how he must have cried.
You cried the same way the night the doctors
said your brother would be a vegetable.
After two hits of acid pepped with PCP,
Matt threw himself through a window.
This world is beautiful only because of
the massive black hole pulling all our light into its heart.
Only because the scrub jay witness to its own mortality
sings in alarm for its dead, until it
is drawn during the body in a prayer only understood
by the ash of the forest.
Stretching away from its origin like our universe,
it will soon collapse.
Let us die dreaming, pretending we will go on forever,
voice as large as the terracotta army
in the tomb of Qin Shi Huang.
Let us be the paint that evaporates from their faces.
Let us be that dust.