--I JUST SHIVER AND SHAKE

Gray Everything

Today there is gray

in everything,

old wounds and raw scars,

collapsible joists and bones,

broken sails and leaky boats,

smoke, always smoke,

slaking through the bleak brine

of another otherwise bright day

while a charcoal canvas,

wide as any ocean,

flops across the brittle spine

of an animal without name.

My eyes go on with their

blind man’s vacant groping.

My fingers knit themselves

a needy corpse.

This room wants me dead,

same as any other room

or loamy future.

Outside, the famished vultures

swing in haze

as the ceiling pounds

its tantrum fists,

the windows weak as rotten teeth,

relenting and imploding,

shattered away,

shattered day,

shattered life,

glass to sand again,

the plumes thick enough

to blur and swallow

what should have been

buried long ago.