There are always references to photography,
and this is entitled "Grayscale."
"Beam of light.
An empty room-- no, not empty.
Cloud, cone, circle, suddenly a set.
And somebody suspended there asleep,
animating with alarm the household objects.
It's flush focus.
Point being, my right ventricle severed whirlpool,
and my motor cortex uniting at a higher pitch
the nearly inaudible hiss with a baseline clicking
of burning surrendered self.
Outside there's wind in the palm trees, a far off siren turning
on atoms.
A 5 o'clock branch dragging the asphalt, also a single leaf,
concise in sidewalk tumble.
If you were prone to forgetting a detail or direction,
here are the scenes before sun-up, a sound source,
television grayscale, gunfire, and strains from a time
I recognize, but not as mine.
The bark of men in chains, reaction, bark, and spit,
and menace in speech.
I was barely awake.
I was barely even a boy.
My mother preparing for work.
Already I knew the war for it was
for her to inhabit the volume and idiom of skin out of true
or in compliant.
Prior to the scene, where she returns in half light
despite the prohibitions a morning
contains in sentences that fail even the swelling oriented
to the audible horizon.
Redacted, here in waiting for the whereabouts of father
in lifelong debility of Earth, in the coercion
of a child given to search for it, for anything."