Sitting on the trunk of your car, we watch the stars slowdance. Something happens. We could never have seen it if we had been looking for it. But we were. One says something, and looks the other in the eye.

Must it be?

I ask myself if you could imagine being unable to breathe, to sleep, to think, to feel, to rest.

Oh.

Being half-dead implies being whole and alive. “Crest implies trough,” I’ve heard it said. And I slide rather easily from perfect assurance to self-medication and back, standing in that threshold. But I’m working on it.

Alone, remember.

Liquor grounds me to the ocean floor. Too high, and I forget what I thought I lost and why I would stay here to look for it. Drowning is too easy and flying, only to come back down, is too hard. But I know a beach. Stop at the bridge and wait for me there.

Wait.

A boy fills a notebook with questions he wants to ask God, should they ever meet. He outgrows the practice and later moves out on his own in Hell. But sleeplessness and madness are the same anywhere and I have a page full things I am dying to know. And a gift, wrapped in a blank page.

For you.

the saline city received your signal on the thirtieth
and the accidental audience held its breath
the new may dawned in silence
with one insomniac avoiding two backwards calls to sleep

I still see you there, a remnant on the southern horizon
where ali and abbey first saw you
standing over venus, her face a ruin
a club in your left hand, her rib in your right like a knife
she had chosen the wrong soft chest to strike