Unit 033: Still can't accept we'll never laugh together again because you're dead.

Every painful breath I grasp,
I feel my innards suffocate –
as fished fish for water gasp
before their skulls collapse and break –
every single time I pass
through this, your neighbourhood of late.

This city has an aura black.
Every last pathetic morsel
of energy is drained, hacked
from my thin fragmented blood. Aorta
shrivels up and hence the cracked
device ⸺ once a heart ⸺ is thwarted.

I hear ecstatic, happy laughter!
And like the spring of a tiger trap,
I make a snappy turn, and after,
survey children playing, then map
a street filled with couples. A blast
occurs inside me. My thoughts crack.

As I approach your sometime house
I tell myself that you are gone.
Unmoved my body does announce
intent to rebel. I halt on the lawn.
Seeing this building compels pain to pounce.
Peer in the window, retreat, I’m done.

I put my grief inside a box,
I dig a hole, deep in the woods.
Six feet. Eight feet. Ten — it’s in!
Mounds of clay, a mount of dirt,
on it, build a pyramid.
Solid rock conceals chagrin.
Decorate, it shimmers gold.,
To tell the world that I am whole.

I put my grief inside a box,
napalm seeping through the mounds,
it stings my eyes, it burns my brain!
One sunny day the thing blew up,
fucking mushroom clouds galore.
A nuclear winter!
Scavenging …
crop failure …
There will be. No harvest. This year.
Any year.
Only … fallout.

I put my grief outside a box