—WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

 

Nothing is Everything

      for Bailey and Chase

 

When my son tells me his

best friend has overdosed

and that my son was the

one who found him,

blue and wood-stiff

on the bedroom floor,

there’s too much rain,

rain hammering on the sill,

on the lilies, on my eyelids, 

on the farthest Heavens,

yet the lawn is scorched,

my hair bone-dry, my

throat a cauldron which

won’t let me lift a word,

not a solitary syllable in the

gaps between his sobs and gasps,

those hollow spaces where

something helpful should

land and soothe and

maybe later take root,

because at a time like this

nothing is everything

and I have nothing to

say or offer and so

everything that matters in

the cracks, among the 

prolonged moments,

crumbles and becomes crushed

until I am worthless

sand in the rain, in the

rein of tears and black dread,

washed away across a world

of parched deserts mirrored

inside the rims of my

son’s deserted eyes