How can you ever begin
to tell them—why it is you
have to write this?
Explain the nearly visible idea,
translucent
like a wraith-like raven,
like a razory, bag-of-bones bird
always nibbling,
always needling away
at the sharp peripheral
corner of your mind—relentlessly
pecking at your temple
while you try
to sleep at night
and always perched
upon your shoulder
and cawing—in that distinctive
scrape-smoldering
caw of his—any time you're awake,
as if he's saying
something about—
diving deeper.
Something about
some divinely comic inspiration
spelled out in quivering
motes of dust
in the stretched afternoon
light of a yellow happy tapioca sun—
the same one that warms
and lulls and will
one day, kill everyone.
Something—about holding
your breath for four
or five years (yes, you begin to imagine,
you could do that), just to hold
for one posthumous moment
in your cheeks and your toes,
in your bowels and your knees;
that sensation of
orgasmic relief—fierce spiraling rockets
splitting the ozone,
fireworks so white-
hot that they're
soothing—slingshotting
out from behind the wide
whites of your eyes
and smacking
against the back of your skull—
which, incidentally
goes a lot
farther back
than you ever thought—
at the exact,
ecstatic second—
when you just can't
seem to
stand it anymore.
