People talk about us in hushed tones,
They watch us in the same way
That you watch a car crash.
And they whisper about us,
In the same way that you are taught not
to speak ill of the dead.

People talk about us,
In memoriam,
In peace,
In pieces.

People talk about us,
As if all we did was break,
As if we were just two people who shattered,
As if we were something unbearably tragic,
And there weren’t enough splinters of us,
To make mosaic hearts out of.

But all I remember,
Are cracks around your eyes.
You laughed so hard that,
It left geoglyphs in the soft expanse of your skin.

And I loved you,
I loved your Nazca laughter lines.
I remember fearlessly,
Furiously,
Loving you.

People talk about us,
As if all we did was break.
But everything that has broken,
Was once gorgeously whole.

We broke many times.
But we loved so many more.

O mighty, tiny heart,
One thousand blessed beats a minute,
beating time, beating gravity, beating death
O mortal metronome
ticking seconds into that certain future
Little wonder Aztec gods bow,
and Nazca lines testify to your
glorious, thirsting, bursting
hummmmmmmmmmmmmmm of life

now still

An opening closed you could not see.
Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmm

O purple thud
O feathery fall from grace
cradling leaf and Gulliver’s hand,
hourglass of heartbeats run out,
lived and gone as never was
Are we responsible for the things that die
because of things they cannot see
things we cannot see
things we cannot

(The Nazca Lines  are a series of large ancient geoglyphs stretching for miles in the Nazca Desert, in southern Peru. One portrays a hummingbird.)