Nightmare Songs: 5

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5.

Softly, the baby’s just asleep in the next room.
Could we our felonies into a leaking pocket . . .
could we forget the darker crimsons of dawn.
There weren’t any visitors then, we were lonely.
So we invented a tongueless vocabulary of our own brief bodies.
In the cold just beyond the fire—we enter savagery like winter.
The air in our throats bites at our teeth.
So we know the warmth of our guts
and the way that we ascribe everything, even air,
by breaking it, by altering it
like anything else true enough to be spoken.
The archaisms of politics circle in a drain.
We have seldom answered the challenge of a quiet morning,
and even then with our safest whispered kindnesses.