The Wake

“aside from his defective vision, he also had constipation”
-musings on Love in the Time of Cholera

What he ends up doing, what he’s
trying to communicate; language, we
are so
numb to everything except for
last night
trains un
thawed and pushed into metal ground un
til a girl woke up heart in throat, bombs exploding;
we don’t really notice it: dreams a convention.

Grow and damage; she got over it, soon a milky sky sweating translucent and
unconsciously a rain, white, drives those rules we
made in class:
subject verb agreement.

Off the top of her head she thinks ‘comma, possessive’; a
man’s skin avoids the typical conventions
of stereotypes. The prose will
comment on itself. The kinds of
things we say, honestly, means
writers have failed.
He once said everything we do
for granted, we
may not be moved, illogical but
we ignore that because
that
same day a black man spit on the
sidewalk outside, he is able
to
make language
refresh itself: the same old
kind of
disaster tale but
harder to follow;
breaking my heart to find
what
the premise was.