Getting Heavier

Prematurely grave – sentences delivered with a note of finality, syllogisms grasped & held in the mind the way excess skin from a facelift vanishes into a crack beside the ears – I stretch myself over the same mattress of bone, morning & evening. I go on as if nothing happened, as if I were free on my own recognizance & this growing heaviness simply means I need more sleep. I’ve become adept at ignoring the jagged piece of sky pressing down on the back of my neck. Since I stopped following the news, my dreams supply all the missing details of earthquake, torture, & mass starvation. Ask me anything. Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night & pretend it’s morning: shower, drink coffee & look for poems in the ready-made phrases I think of as inspired, because breath belongs to everyone & no one & I am trying not to give undue weight to the new reports that claim it is oxygen, stripping the electrons from other molecules, that slowly reduces this body to a swamp of light.