Every day the world ends
through habit, safe in the arms

of an overplayed song
under a tattered sky's brocade.

Walls become whale bones,
sparrows scatter from displaced eaves.

Between washed up dross, only wind.
Take the empty space from every atom

of every person, stone, ocean,
and what's left might fill

a few chuckling dice.
It's a wonder how heavy

nothing weighs. It's a wonder
we don't fly apart into dust.

Not enough sky in my bed to sleep
I unzip the street on its dotted line
and throw fallen stars back to heaven.
Take them back, take it all back,
the night's heat and dust and stagnant air
this pall that blows headlights to blanks
and horizons to none. My own silence
so anticipated and yet so sudden.
No one mentioned this unnumbered stage,
a final doubling from last year to now —
when it happened, will have always happened,
and everything I thought packed away.
Missing you remains both fact and act
I fall forwards instead of down, like a plane.