Dear Whoever You Are,
Once again, I fell to sleep, eventually.
The amount of pain I felt was beyond
my tolerance for accepting it as 'just pain'
and rather, I believed it to be mental illness.
Things will never end will they?
But the part of you that is they
knew this, know this.
I wonder who is the teacher?
Is it you or the devil? In the morning
I wake to realization, that kind of nausea
which everyone knows.
It will be there for some hours.
It is a pattern we learn to live with,
not an old friend but a regular visitor.
A mailman or garbage collector.
The sadness arrives in the heart
inches up through the esophagus
to return to the stomach and ends up in the hands.
where it circles back into the heart and runs
the circuit until it is divested of the pertinent
electrons responsible for the distribution of grief.
Grief? The losses endured. The loss
of things no longer even there
to remember let alone to grieve.
Ancestors. They are there but no longer have names
we are two generations away from being strangers
in the diaspora of the dead.
Dear whoever you are, my question is this:
have you felt your skin on inside-out yet?
