Gloom

My brother said that the fire looked fake and the log

was too lit with orange and I thought about that and my

mind rolled into my stomach like a marble big and heavy

and I already said that I wanted you babe but I want a lot

more than that too I want to pour the pink of sky

at sunset down my throat like Peptol Bismol

chalky cool coating my guts. I want guts. I want guts.

I want glasses that sharpen the fine lines of time so that

I can stop counting down days like I’m waiting to die.

I read that in Turkey there’s a family that walks on all fours,

hunched at the hips with knees of the ground in a bear

crawl imagine that not knowing that the way you walked

was wrong to everyone else in the world have you ever

caught a glimpse of what it would be like to be wrong

about everything each time I have actually the one single

time that I have I thought I would die on the spot and I’ve spent

the rest of my life forgetting what that felt like; no one

has ever lived more than  once at Brunch Michael talked

about decreasing margins of life extensions and

I didn’t fully understand but pretended I did and he said that

the first immortal person might be only 10 years younger

than the first person to live to 150; my dad said that 9 out of 10

of the people who live to be 114 die when they’re 114. There are

limits, it seems, he said. I tried hard to be convivial or congenial
I’m not sure which but death really looms, when you think about it.