today i am at work
it is very monday
everyone's face is very monday
the halls are muted
the sky is an even grey
i can't tell if it's raining

saturday morning, the oven clock was blinking 12:00
something made it forget the time
i woke up to no internet connection
silently, i blamed my
****** roommate, her boyfriend, the cat

the cable company e-mailed me
to apologize and make promises,
speculating a downed tree or
car accident

(life mysteries: an e-mail to
tell me i don't have internet
like a letter to tell me
the post office is closed
like a missed phone call
to tell me to check my work e-mail
because a car is wrapped around
a utility pole and a boy
is in a hospital and his friend
just isn't anymore
so now this sixteen year old
has to carry the friend he
didn't mean to ****, dragging
his body down the corridor at
school, propping it up in the
bathroom each morning so
those unseeing eyes reflect
in the mirror, cradling
it to sleep each night)

it was later that day that
facebook (peace be upon it)
told me this child had died
his ghost must have got caught
in all those power lines and
the joy he had in life was too
much for copper or aluminum
to bear and so it wept great
showers of electrons and
made my oven forget the time and
made the earth forget
a boy

but today i am at work
in nine years, i've said bye-for-now
to maybe a thousand pairs of optimistic eyes
most don't come back
so each year, i silently erase them from my heart
(it doesn't hurt, after nine years)
i have become well-practiced in the art of letting go
so today i feel only guilt for feeling
nothing

i tell myself
boys die every day, i
tell myself we can't
weep for all of them

the principal tells me to send the lost kids to the library
but give the rest normalcy, so i spend the day painted thick
with forced calm over false pain over shut eyes

today i teach them where wind comes from
the way nature tries to smooth out bumps
until everything is equally cold and dead
i teach them anemometers measure wind speed
because anemo is like animate or animal and
they all mean wind or spirit or motion
because those are synonyms and i silently wonder
if boy's spirit has joined the atmosphere as some
small bright gust
dancing snowflakes into drifts and
playing music in the leaves for
millenia, racing faster as sun grows hotter,
finally escaping into interstitial space


friday, they will lower him into the ground.