I’ve played every game of hide-and-go-seek
In every crepuscular backyard
I’ve ever been offered and yet I still have hungry bones,
They crave public speaking and guitar solos and
A mossy bunker syruped in insurgent nighttime,
Yellow Dairy Queen drive-thru windows when it’s still not quite spring and
Attic card games that smell like quilts and old wood.
It has really always been fear-
Fear that the others wouldn’t see the execrable constellations of flies on the windowsill
Or the way the aurulent old glass panes warped the tree branches.
I had this doomish consciousness that it was my notice that animated these jewels,
I gave them souls that
Followed me forever, their gaunt and incomplete faces impressing that
I must remember them.