sketches of an afterlife

"and if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, 

it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty." 

 -Leonard Cohen

i.

if time were alive, i would give her a name and feed her every day on the dot, look into her sad eyes and proclaim to her my soul by letting her see herself in my eyes. for that is the only kind of love, one that embraces passing.

ii.

oh to fail, that i may rise above worship and be the air. my father says i will never win anything in my life. i say, i will never need to. for the soul is your hardest day turned to bread, and the only way to end it is to fill yourself.

iii.

tell me more of the devout. all i know of them is allegiance. i want to know more about their destruction. i want to see them land on their knees and try to divine their fates in the dark. i want to see them lie. i want to discover each betrayal in all their covenants, hold fast to  knives and tuck the sheen away in sinew. everybody’s faith deserves to be tested by the body. that is what the world is for. to grind us in its blue audacity and make us crumble away into ideas.

iv. 

there is a kind of booze about your pity. the kind that gallops down the throat roughshod and grazes in that little knoll in your gut. if the heart were a sunrise, then i would end this poem now and bow in silence. if our words could do anything, i wish they’d yield to our voices and tear the real just enough once in a while for us to play in perfection.

v.

one day in the early 1960s in the province of Montreal, there was a young Spanish man who took his own life. the only thing he left were the six musical chords he taught a little boy the day before. that boy grew old making poems and songs with those six chords.

vi.

a droplet joins a pond and muddles its gloss. you will all be my ghosts.