The menace of a messenger

carrying news from the portrait

of our brilliant scars

is as childless

as the dying tanager

within our polestar,

a palliation we mask

to maintain a resemblance

to those poets whose thicket

of bodies & thought

echo with stories

broken by couplets & lines

that waltz through their towns

as if we forgot

the dismembered art

laid to rest in the pines—

the vines of our passion

through a wood of despair

remember a time we believed

our friends were there

reading our poems

& not tossing them aside

to drown themselves

in pesticide

or write the same letter

over & over

about part time work

& a busy Passover

indifferent that God’s house

was already in foreclosure—

how we thought they’d see

the burdens we carried

within the jasmine

in our satchels

tucked between our knees

or that our glass frames

had grown too fragile & wary

to hold ourselves together

for another journey

through the prairie—

to our once dear friends

for whom we’d have died,

witnesseth what has become

of our exquisite, sorry lives

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