POEM

Life doesn’t pass like a fiction.
It puddles up like new oceans
in facts that seek signs, convictions,
directly to the bone upon the mild flesh—
a Pathos as Frosty as Robert’s
Natural World; an Index glossing
all deaths into darkness. She tells me
that she feels trapped in her body:
If one tells that to just anyone,
they may take you & throw you
out of the window; your spirit
braided to theirs; an encounter of grace,
splattered blood & guts that resembles
dried brownie residue. Sawdust flakes.
Back into the earth goes one’s remains.
Let me keep you, snug, closer, like
an atom bomb frozen to a Japanese sky,
plunging to a purposelessness; a way
of muttering, “What’s really in a Picture?”
The Mind, from the East to the West,
is a wind that never calms.