I botched my reconstruction.
The arches of my cathedrals lie unfinished, burned bone.
You can see strait through my ribs into the living room-- one breast gone.
War is never civil
and its aftermath, never logical.
Reluctant combat of minds and hearts,
my body aches for you,
my conquered heart
reaching blindly for your familiar arms,
to find nothing but air.

My breath is barbed;
skeletal strings shift into smoke,
drifting into the shadows
as the darkness will choke.

Pearl snow stuffs my skull;
my grandmother in an earthern womb,
sleeps under it all.
A tombstone the last thing we bought--
a report card of her life:
She is with Him in Heaven, In Paradise...
With Him, Without Pain--
is speculation but turns into thought.

The icy steps do not deter me
as I sit on the crooked concrete spine;
speaking to her, hoping the snow
does not make her cold, any more,
'I can stay a while longer...
I do not have to go home, yet.'

-

Eco-friendly light spills from under the door,
forming a pool as yellow as diseased skin.
The brass doorknob is like a girl I once loved:
******* the outside, hollow in the inside,
unable to be moved and okay with it.
Fury from a faucet fills the bathtub
and rings my ears with its intent:
to fill a void and go away when cold.

She lays in the water
the city treats better than us,
wading in a wealth of watermelon wash;
her body flushed from fading flesh,
pores swim and stretch around
cursive carvings, kissing cursed curves--
and I sit upon a bone-white curb,
stirring my finger in the soup of her day;
watching the drain ****, wondering
if she'll, too, drift away.

The house, when empty,
feels like a moseleum.
Everything is dark.
It is strange, how literally I can feel the heart tear.
Pericardium and myocardium,
ripping with the slow, tough **** of time and waiting,
atrium and ventricle split.
Far away my brain turns in on itself
as I stare at the candy on the road,
left from a Christmas parade,
Defined by the things its left behind,
though they lie unwanted.

My soul has fled to the wilderness
birth pangs of grief beginning,
prepared to deliver a stillborn heart,
As another star falls out of my sky.

It will go dark, I know.
One by one fall, without wishes to bring them back.
I stare at my sister's golden hair
and dread the day when she will be the one lying white,
bloodless
in a hospital bed.
Oh my mother, Oh my father,
are you to fall away, too?

Light. I scream, I need light.
But I will not throw bits of glass at the sky
to pretend I have re-lit the stars.