Grief is not a song you wrote once
Nor the padded, downturned corners of your face.

Grief lives below your footsteps
A black hole with mass
in the shape of a giant ape.
Each of your labored steps begets its sweeping swing below.
Your soles are its vines.

Between each footstep, as it moves with you
you think the weight of it might be gone.
Grief delights in this deception
as it seizes up-down once more,
reaching into the core of you
and pulling it to the bottom of your shoes.
Some part of you, torn away, lands with a leaden thunk
and cramps the delicate inner muscles of your feet.
Maybe it’s the soul
or more likely
it’s some forgotten vestigial *****
which only emerges through its own absence.

Now hollow in your middle
the muscles surrounding contract in confusion
thinking, knowing, that the empty space is wrong
but not quite able to recall
what had been there in the first place.
and so you think your heart is seized by grief,
when really, you are confused, you are feeling only
nothing.

as Grief lives beneath the ground
as Grief swings beneath your feet.