The Grief Machine

Draft from Death of the Abstract Artist

"Some nights, there is blood in my bed.

Some nights I am very tired by do not sleep.

I am intangible; no one can feel me.

They press their hands to my face and pass through.

I press my hands to my face and pass through.

I am intangible and want to be touched bery hard.

Which is a lie because I am tangible and want to be touched very gently.

I feel sun on my skin but it does not feel how it should.

The air is tighter at night.

Which is better than when it is very cold and my skin swells.

My eyes will be sucked out of their sockets by the vacuum created by my grief.

My grief has become a tangible thing.

It sits in the air and lays itself across my lungs at night.

It peels off my skin and pins it to the table.

All the veins have been removed because I realize they are not very helpful anymore.

There is no blood left for them to transport,

The blood is all in my bed and instead, my veins are stuffing grief into every crevice.

My heart is pumping grief.

I am matching moving grief and run on grief and consuming grief and producing grief.

And every poem is an attempt to nail down that grief.

On the things I have lost which are no longer mine to lose.

And the things which will make themselves lost to me in one year or ten.

The previous poem was an illustration of my liver; it tried to filter out the grief.

But it was built to break down toxins;

And the grief did such a fabulous job convincing it that it had always been a part of the systems.

There were eight or nine years at the beginning when everything worked as it should.

Before grief began to slip in through every pore and find corners to tuck away into.

My poems are long, rambling things.

Because I am trying to point to where then grief is but it keeps moving."