"I don't know what the words
he speaks to the walls
in hushed impatience mean.
A perimeter of experience
perfectly seamed
between the real
and unreal.
A portrait of the forest
with no leaves."

It goes like this:

Our noise
The wreckage of being alive
Will eventually grass over into something natural
and unadorned.

Taking our self-interest away.
Emptying decades of ego
drip by
drip.

Forgetting the birds in the trees,
how vast a neighborhood felt passing by school bus windows,
and the way dew beaded
in front the hospital when they said
“We’re out of options.”

Sorrow,
however human,
has always staunched itself just beyond each hallway’s end.

A vastness terrifying and grim.
Like the inedible gristle
from a cheap steak
forever rolling between gapped molars.

Eventually the coping mechanisms fade,
and we accept the bristling fact
it’s never going
to get better.

Bide time ruminating,
how our bodies careened off one another.
Something primally magical
about the curve of bones
concussed by freckles bloomed in desert sun.

And how time has left each appendage
standing suddenly disconsolate
and devoid of humanity.
The odd one out,
picked neither for shirts
nor skins.

You gradually get worse at self-preservation.
Faltering when remembering words
or what side of the bathroom door the handle is on.
Movement eventually follows, leaving you bed-bound.
Taking note, your immune system quietly packs it’s bags
and slinks out the back door slow
so you can wither to an unencumbered close.

I want my sloughed tissue brain
to struggle against a thin strand of humanity,
fighting the fade of your presence
harder than the fact I can no longer spell my sibling’s names.

Will yours remember me?
Or will it stay tied down elsewhere,
bruises being choked into it’s pliable facade.
A miasma of crop tops and denim skirts.

It will arrive,
certain
but unannounced.
The culmination of a life well-lived.
Feedback, white-noise, static,
silence.
Peace as stark as a womb.

Yet when I close my eyes now,
all I see is the gnashing of teeth.