It was kind of you Lord letting ghosts use bones
to make suffering’s silhouettes
that from earth might be renegade clouds,
agitated formations of abandoned sky
nursing on god’s latest grief. Isn’t this
why men do dangerous things like sleep
as small children with dead fish in bowls
fade like sheep on a barbwire fence,
their weeping the sound memory makes
strutting like mothers off insomnia’s pier,
where often there aren’t enough eyes to watch
as tiny fingers, dream they are hooks, torn
from the gills in a fisherman’s hands,
erasing the sea’s need to pretend that
breath behind glass present, or gone,
is why we float up for each other.
