I will hear your voice someday. It may

sound tinny in the thread of a tin can but at least 

it won’t hurt as bad. Quiet jazz in an empty bar found you

open-mouthed, made you weep harder than the stab wound.

No present or future, only past exists in the smell of your breath—

was it the knife that killed you, or the broken bottle?

You saw enemies in dark corners, I told you to buy a lamp,

you told me you were losing, I wondered if I would lose you.

Now I live an unending quest and to myself, myself listens:

tip axes now, turn facing pages backwards in every book 

you love, destroy world order in favor of eternity,

justly set it ablaze, and don’t believe in eternity because

all you will find is wind.

I wake up lacking any remembrance regarding my dreams, but

I think I fell asleep during a lunar eclipse. It seemed like twilight

and the shades trailed behind me in the drizzle, grasping hands

with stars led astray by a drunken deity. I wake up the next day

whispering Latin like quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius,

the exclusive listener a mind I wish wasn’t mine.

Just, please, lift my veil when the time arrives.

You leaked life in red, painted my room with it,

you love a former me and I love a former you. The phantom 

fixed on my bedroom floor playing a lullaby

in a hurricane, bent over an immortal guitar. I am no longer

the fearful child tucked into bed, and yet I have never grown.

You found joy in other people, and I am trapped at the zenith

with the wind I found, quarreling with God. 

If life is an hourglass, I see you crosswise, warped like a prism

and praying for sun on your wedding day. I will be nearby,

small and happy and fading, a shadow of our childhood

binding us, weighing us, freeing us.

Our sequences of divine besiege will never end, you promise me

you died from no broken glass, however bloody your jukebox looked,

and perhaps I imagined our zealous knives.