An Elegy

How far do you have to travel to arrive

at dying—they seem to be asking, but you might 

 

as well be alone in this room, its bruised walls and shanty 

window looking at nothing, spiked lines of a horizon 

 

to indicate your breathing.  Chortle then a gasp, running

in your mind’s field through windswept dandelions

 

and knee-high grass, blades bristling against

your skin like the needle feeding you, to a clearing

 

where he kissed you long and earnestly.  Your lips

part in memory, a sunken jaw caked with Vaseline, 

 

gaping, desperate to recapture the feeling of flesh

on flesh when you were once essential.  You bite

 

down hard at the finger massaging your barren gums,

your wisp of a face turning a cat’s indecipherable grin.  

 

It’s decided you’ve still got a little left in you, but 

there is no use for such sentiments in the realm of sleep

 

when your tongue, tied, weighed down like a bag of stones

cast in a swollen river writhes with itself.  Faces

 

you do not know or remember are speaking 

with their hands, shadowboxing the waning autumn

 

light.  You can only hear the sound of rushing 

water filling your bed, ears, throat, your sopping 

 

mouth, drowning slowly in all that remains unsaid.