Farewell to Poetry

I give myself  to the end of  this poem to decide.

I empty myself, have emptied myself 10,000 times,

like a lung. I guess that’s a terrible estimate. We breathe a fuckton—

even when air has skunk taste and texture, as opposed

to its usual quiescence. Never thought I’d get to use

that word, quiescence, or specious, or obeisance, even though

I think a lot, which seems like a straight shot to writing,

yet side by side body and mind struggle to work in tandem,

but one at a time you feel the other melt into instinct,

yanking your hands out of the hearth or daydreaming about Kyoto

while a stranger who thinks you’re staring at him makes a face

your eyes can’t see, having flipped the iris inward

like a standing mirror before a bed a couple shamefully shares.

What makes us so deserving of space in other people’s minds?

When the car window breaks open and you seal your blind spot

with a black garbage bag, as you’re trying to change lanes,

do you remember how much we’ve complained about

ourselves, throwing meaning into our mischief  like salt into a pool?

Beware! The sidewalk scorpions are prowling about the kitchen,

claws scraping through grout. Meanwhile we turn and turn,

first to some garden, briefly, next to a scatterbrained table,

before finally the shapeshifter’s trench coat unhooks itself

from the shower rod. We take turns putting it on, choosing

the Invisibility setting, which we intuit as addictive

before retreating to our personas to deal with withdrawal.

Yet having developed a taste for breath we find we cannot stop

losing it. It’s elusive as the glimmer of oil on asphalt, a blackbird’s

coat bending to sunbeams. This is what we have decided to pursue,

bent on one leg, two ballerinas of imbalance. We are chasing it

up the parking garage, ignoring the various fonts

in which slurs are sharpied on stairwells before, on the roof,

we lose the color we sought in the light in a violent sunset,

yet go on staring into it, trying to read the negative language

the sun scribbles inside our eyelids. Yours says,

“Do not damage with your eye all that already shines.”

Here’s mine: “What are you staring at the sun for?

Some of its darkness it gets from us.”