I am angry at you, Death

Death, I have been angry at you

For such a long time

And I still am

So angry at you

For giving me too many things to take myself away from

Hollow out the time of them for the sake of it

Metal bowls I leave the fruit in, but they change eventually

I don’t want to ever not change, but I want something constant

Like the ocean

I don’t want the ocean to ever die

And yet, you steal the saltwater from it as a lark

You take the seabirds from it one by one

As you glance at them casually, a party

Of seabirds raining down

My breath labored

At the light of all my birds

Raining down on the ocean.

You know, one day, I will kill you

Before you have a chance to

Do anything anymore to the people I love

Leaving them awry in the summer sun

Or bloody on the pulpit

Leaving all the people I love bloody on the pulpit

And raining down with things I cannot contain

I cannot contain you but I will kill you

So swiftly one day in the morning

I will enter a room and there will be so much

Folding of the Spring that I have created and made

My life into it will be like you are dead once and for all

How will you feel to be dead once and for all?

All of it happening to you like you have no empathy

I don’t think it is that you have no empathy

But moreso that you are so wild

You cannot stop to consider our feelings

On the day I will kill you I will be so wild

That I will not have a civilized moment to consider your feelings

I will act upon you in a reddish smoky haze

Because I am more powerful than you ever gave me credit for

My limits exceed that of other men before me

And I have prepared for this strike

My whole life

And when the time is upon us

I will do the thing I have set out to do for this humanity

As you creak under me into the earth

A groaning, lepered thing

A fallen thing we will all learn to forget forever

There are mice crawling everywhere here

In this house

There were four birds, or were there six,

Or seagulls rather, that flew through the Russian sky

And they were always there or will be forever

Alone in that sky, or with each other

White birds that fly through a white expanse

Of an airy feel like snow or semen

Or milk, holywater that flows from the heavens.

I have decided to be an alien, or to live alone

On a spaceship with lifeforms that escape me

By their many years ahead of me.

Still, it is not midnight yet, but this poem is very old

And I do that, write poems that are very old, much older than me

Even though I am at this moment decomposing into nothingness

Like the rotting flower that God meant for my body

Woman in the green bathroom, who descends the bathtub

Because it is her time to haunt

Or it is rather, she can’t get out of there

The way the birds can’t ever get out of that painting

The way Emily Dickinson is in that house, whether she likes it or not, for all of history

Her brown hair surrounding her face in the same white bed

The grapes in the small silver bowl next to her, not rotting but frozen for all eternity

In mid-gasp

Things are like that, whether they escape (and I mean escape) into the bloody footprints of hell

Or they go down like saints, with children at their bedside.

It is all frozen in time, like a static shot of bloody leaves

All along the baseboard of my mind.

Still, the saddest movie in the world shouldn’t scare us

Don’t be scared of the saddest movie in the world that is your favorite

You are not fixed in their story, that is theirs

And when you leave this earth, it will be of your own free will

To go into that snowy plain that you have understood completely

And when I said that the sublime is only the beginning I meant that too

That to be one bird in snow is to know you have nothing left to lose

So the fullness of life is right upon you

The tomatoes, the tomatoes, the lemons

The orange fruits, the lemons, upon you, wandering in the dark forest

Is not the loneliness of life, but only the idea of love

Still soaring above us in the wind

Under a mask or some

blanket of substance that

face full of violence bursts

I am not really sure

what this means to see

things two women kissing

one young the other

old an enormous flag

wraps around itself the

wind curls like spirit

gives head behind a veil

of hair none can see

heaven through just the

colorlessness of our crying

Like a form of hunger your

Life that will never give you

Those things you thought

You wanted when only night

Can be saved every refusal

You made for the effort of it

And the survival of all efforts

Noontides the will was like

Those leaves you seemed to

See rustling above your head

The fires your eyes lit-up re-

calling their past detachment.

Susceptible sunlight no soundtrack pans 

Fact without music the slight trace of the

Nothing he was us the pressure in events

And wind that produces and chance peeps-

out from that world where the dead would

Go if they are not still in fact here graphic

Because there is always a war on elsewhere

Not a metaphysics but a war those heads

Sitting in the dark not one mind nor making-

up one nation take-up that “movie violence”

As if their oldest and most familiar wishes.