You bought two guns
and left for the north east.
I am calm, you said.
Just under the skin of the new year,
and wolves nest in throats like a panic.
Planes, so restless as to fly empty,
wait to be put down.
It’s not only pollen that churns the air.
Eyes roll into their sockets to follow the charts:
infection rates, an extroversion.
You said, we’ll talk when things settle down.
We thought if we gave Death our party drugs,
we would be spared the hangover.
I love you, but that’s a drop of acid in my eyes.
Whole regions of people lose an appetite between us now.
All our bodies were already secret lovers in congress,
semi-trucks, market trends.
Things are going to change, you said.
The old life plans a retirement party,
leaves us all pretend-astronauts,
our transparencies, digital and glass.
You proved you can leap over a past,
as command centers flicker,
tart and disposable like berry skin.
.
The anarchists point out our hostages are busy,
sneak away. Landlords conspire,
researching property taxes of ghost towns.
I imagine flight attendants sharing cocktails with the pilots,
peeling back the latest rumors
miles above the nervous ground, the take off, the lay off.
Medical personnel, too, are gravely short of carnival masks.
The economy, turns out, was only a hobby.
There is no plan B for me, no dental plan even.
I have to find what make up remains,
to walk among the dead with a pulse.
Remember that performance, when the audience
were a haze of alcohol, and you led me by the hand
into the pool? You soft-spoke, “it’s okay,” and
smiled in the flavor of a tangerine.
I miss you is the language of a stray bullet.
You know I think about you
