Total

WATCHED POT APOSTROPHES


You will never boil. You’ll go blind
not doing that. In space, your blood
will also refuse to boil. No surprise
all the movies are dead wrong,
though my nerves aren’t soothed
whenever I’m bobbing in the vacuum
like an apple in ice water.
You are going to receive money.
And then you’ll spend it
on a fiberglass replica
of the sports car you wanted
when you were thirteen.
Or fifteen. You may think this matters,
this discrepancy fluttering
in your face like a rabid moth.
Trust me, you will summer in Ceylon.
When they decide to change
that name back. When all
the maps at once go a little bad.
I have assumed more
than is good for one’s soul.
You’ll inform me you bled out a long time ago.
In Chicago. In Reading.
Somewhere cold. Winter
all the time, where people go
down to the frozen water
with a rusted crowbar
and bash the skin of the ice back to current.
You were one of them,
weren’t you, with death
itching in the brain like a cloud of midges?
You won’t fall if I let go.
I never held you in my arms.