we are each to ourselves, selected amongst the few –
yet you cannot help but
be mortal.

you, mortised to sleep.
I sick behind white walls that will never
bring your laughter
back to that small frame in front of picture windows.

I look at the world around me
reduced to a grey-faced elbow room,
as the flickering lamp lays out
all the sorrows we forget in our sleep.

who are you?
I pucker up and pull this bottle
snuggled in my clenched fist
and I cannot help but think of any other
thighed upon the cold brink of this bed,
I cannot unthank the existence of flowers
that refuse to bloom in the Sun,
all the more the birds so clearly far better fate
than this enigmatical.

we are each to ourselves and selected amongst the few –
I am the same bar-drunk soul
you met years ago, and will perhaps be
that in all the hours that lay before your callow eyes.
when it is time to draw
the knife,
blinded by the glint of your bones,
wired to the same mind that has once
had me tippling over furniture.

you are this very distant portrait in the
mausoleum that I told many people about,
wanting to go there but my feet can’t – there is a slender
thread eyeing in itself a margin between
the two of us.

and now you turn in your great wave of motion,
next to me, pressed against the sheets
far from being tossed out of sleep.

and along with you, the wind drags a cold, lunar tail:
they are marvelous in their slowness,
and the dark grows more immense than the probability
of you sinking and I, emerging,

turning, turning,
breathing,
so much the turning
and never staying still – there is inimitable life
in this dreariness,

half an elbow,
knees pared to moons,
collarbones and all that music
hung on some frail home,
sovereign of nose
and that whiteness to a paling mood,

almost at the verge of leaving
but cannot because there is conscience tossed out of sight
like a living work of guillotine

immortalized in this sleeplessness that begs
for more waking hours,

continuing in darkness, your eyes close and close and
close like the many doors
that have disappeared
    before me,

     and the frailest thing that
we have
       almost, if not always
loved.