How We Lived

           ^{2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022…}

And sparrows unthread nests, bring their young nothing
And shadows best seen inside the pitch of a cave
And three hearts stabbed on a train because of courage
And jacarandas flick cinder and blacken the ground
And the harbor horn is a creature roping hulls to the reefs
And the reefs gleam with chrome and absence
And absence is welcome
The bullet is welcome
The malignant cell is welcome
The gray faces and their merciless tongues are welcome
And a father is reptilian in his regard. And a mother stitches
Her lips like a wound.  And the wound smells of silence and its blaring
And a child lays hands on a mine.  And a man swallows his lies without measure
And a woman is told she is less than him she is less than the bodies left
Behind, less than the unmade, the never-was, the dirt forgotten by the tracks
And I no longer care about the losses. I no longer care if the last 
Bit of bark is stripped from the earth, if the starved possum survives
The road, whether my neighbor coughs blood while she drags off a red
Or the hand turning the knob means me harm. I no longer fear 
The inexorable diagnosis, the oceans rising to such heights
In my dreams they are monstrous but we are all still running 
Towards each other, in this latest hour, refusing to shutter our eyes.