When a man found a rotting piano
In the woods of Germany,
Each unplayed note traveled through his red blood veins
up to his brain painting colors of wound and gas mask.
He could hear the music of war within each taste of sheltered forest air.
In his nails, shadows of bleed
and drops of motor oil,
the residue of sea salt from the hulls of ships.

The man
Thought of all the Jewish and non Jewish fingers
That never touched each key.
He played all the combinations of chords never played
On the tree trunk next to him.
The man felt his right fingers cramp,
Riger-mortic,
And saw his fallen brother behind the largest tree holding his palm the same way.
He thought of all the stiffened hands sitting in holes dug by living hands,
Hands begging for one more sip of water soup,
Hands begging for freedom,
Hands begging for death.

The man forgot his salt crusted boots.
The man couldn't forget how his gas mask could have saved two more hands to play the unplayed piano.

In a fourth grader's bed there are rats eating at her mattress stuffing,
Stealing for her own young.
They nip at her toes while she finishes her math homework.
She always is hungry
Because at night the vermon crawl down windpipe to steal mother's cooking.
Mother is forced to throw away the mattress like a forgotten sock,
But fourth grader still wakes up sick from churning bile
In an empty stomach,
Because Mother was just fired from gas station #12.
Fourth grader has forgotten the feeling of warm toes, comfortable back, and being undesirably full.

The joint in your hand quaked
Under the pressure of your diagnosis,
Its flame slipping into the air,
While your last puff trickled into left lung.
At first you smoked for depression.
Now it was a cry to God,
A beg for mercy from lifeless feet,
A trip down a flight or two of stairs,
A fall in the shower.

I didn't know how you would walk again without your toes
Knees
Hips.
But I learned your condition is a silent killer -
it started with the smallest flakes of skin,
As Satan lit an accurate match to singe your nerves.

You told me you had MS
And I didn't know why your breaths became frantic,
Or your tears screaming.
"Mean spirited",
"Mouthy sister",
Was what I told my friends.
God was playing jump rope with his spinal cord.
Multiple sclerosis didn't roll off my tongue so quickly,
first attempts were stutters at best -
I had to grow up first.
And while I was lying about your health
You were in agony over your grandmother,
Dead for five years on a stained hospital sheet.

In the end she begged for death,
And we have years to go.

I am 14.6 billion years old. I am energy traveling at the speed of light,
I am a single proton with one orbiting electron, perfectly balanced
With quarks and bosons and higgs inside
And pieces of matter yet to be understood by man.
I am every star, every atom of Hydrogen fused to Helium.
I am a massive object of molten rock, cooling and fusing.
I am trilobite knee and dinosaur tooth,
Wooly mammoth hair fiber.
I am Permian Extinction, I am Ice Age, I am all surviving species.
I am most distant brothers of man, I am first language and first songs.
I am Bubonic Plague and Death
And life out of new molecules from old.
I am the Industrial Revolution,
I am Depression and Holocaust and oppression.
I am titanium and assembly line.
I am Perseid meteor shower and Halley ’s Comet.
I am every black hole,
Inside, another whole universe of me.

I am seconds young, and I have much to learn of
The multitudes of the universe, myself.

The unmistakeable footprints of the Sun
walk all over my soul
just after the shivers down my spine
tell me someone walked over my grave
and no mathematician can formulate
the sacrifice the Moon has made
when shining full for lovers to swoon.

Black acrid smoke
spirals into a clear blue sky

and children all red bloodied
suffer the consequences

of Mans refusal
to love his neighbours.

That was the end
of her holy affair,

when she knelt, out of habit
and felt fresh air

finding the gaps
where her gods once were

like light finds the edge of a door
when it's not shut so tight as before..