Dear cicadas:

 

Remember when breakfast

was a cup of coffee and a cigarette,

every morning standing with my back to the wind--

the glass statue,

arm wrapped around her waist, wrist poised

like a broken neck.

 

You sing alone in the humid silence,

the sparrow assembly not due for another hour.

I forgot to wear shoes again,

still have calluses

but not just on my feet anymore.

Still grab at my skin

trying to tear it off the bone,

strip myself down until I’m

a handful of crooked ligaments and a

hand-me-down heart,

spit in the carnage pooling at my ankles--

let her evaporate.

 

I ash the cigarette--

crane perched on my elbow,

skin drenched in summer.

I was emptier then.

Easier for wind

to blow through me,

easier for colors to get lost in my body.

Take a wrong turn at the clavicle

and end up just far enough away from my fingers

I could only write in gray.

 

Summer never got better.

An August full of coffee

and cigarettes

and a silent glass statue

just me

and you mocking tree crickets

that never knew

I was imagining the end of time,

all the time.

A day that wasn’t melancholy for breakfast,

mania for dinner.

The end of suffering,

the end of begging myself

to use the ashtray and not my thighs,

the end. Imagining when

life would be filling again.

When the face in the mirror would be pretty again.

 

Suitors of summer,

you couldn’t have known

the scourge inside my body

raging in this heat,

infertile lands of fruitless harvest

I was wilted and mangled

you couldn’t have known

but I hated you anyway!

Every morning ringing in my ears

your incessant lament,

devotion to that brooding sun

my enemy! My enemy!

The voyeur of my stale death;

your God.

 

But did you notice, innocent cicadas,

that a better day did come?

And I never made it back

to that porch.