salt.

i have felt
the way one feels
upon entry to cold water, then
staying too long: the shock,
lung-crushing; the slow-settling
acclimation; the notion
of off-kilter; the quaking sabotage
of a diaphragm swathed in a steady skin,

the death surrounding felt as home:
to sink into the blossoming embrace
of silken salt, the absence
of self-soothing half-heartedness, of shifty talk,
of wars of words; salt
fills my mouth: mineral silence
of its own volition.

grief:
the great do ask, don't tell, 
The Great Luxury, a privileged indulgence
secret and dirty as masturbation, its otherworldliness
too intense as to believe it a singular passage but instead
a tangle of transformation unfit for usual narrative spools; at
a wool patterned of grief (and there is a pattern), I can naught
but cast it sideways and, arms outstretched in this silken salt, consider instead heavenlies burning
desperately, brilliantly, stark lifeless
yellow of need in the vacuum that surrounds

i crave
the whirlwind and motion of need exacerbated
by excess, empty of the ways that matter, blinded by
yellow diamonds in the light. but instead, I practice
the shape of foreign tongues: confessions of crimes
and naivete
and a stillborn faith