hospice

what you fear the most will come to pass. the cold hands of erasure will snatch the sun from the sky. mouthfuls of history will dissolve on your tongue and then disappear all at once.

you will build a shrine where the left side of darkness unfolds its body. where light sings a symphony of skin. where rivers run with coal and not water and all you will hear is the crush of flowers beneath feet.

the third track on an old record will pull you into a vacuum and leave you on your grandmother’s couch when you were 10. your fingers stained with the red from cherries and your mouth full of homemade mango nectar. a place where everything is bathed in a pinkish hue and there is no hurt.

you will take a bus then a train to the salt mines carved under the skin of your first real love. you will lay in the soft sand hills of her and try to remember her voice for a moment. you will dig out trenches from the lines of your palms, and your eyes will leak bitterness from when you poured out the longing of you. you will try to sing the song your mother sang to you everyday when you were little and croak only half letters and off-key phrases.

they will gather and ask “where is your father? where are your brothers and all the things that made here a home?” but you don’t know anymore. you don’t recognise anything anymore. the rain will rinse the earth off headstones and then you will see that you have outlived them, and those before them.

now you sit alone with the thing itself. the depression. the deficient heart. God. inside your mind it is dawn and you are home again. you laugh because it is not the stories they spun of wild explosions, thunderstorms and people desperately crying for help.

this is how it all ends. in a slow, sweet burn.