on mute

I want you to know that when
you woke up yesterday morning
And scratched yourself and walked
Out into the cold
Your mother felt the frigid tearing snap
Of the life cord ring around your neck
In the violent morning day ready
To grab you up and leave you unfindable
To the rest of us.

You didn’t need the wind.
You found your blood
out there in some vial hanging
On eaves at the neighbor’s duplex—
Frozen and suspended in dusty midair
Like some abandoned February percolating dew.

Scrawlers, brandish your wells of ink and emotion
Spring is hardly here but
There’s poetry in the transition to longer days
And the snowbanks receding like old man’s hair;
You played chicken with the train and
The foundation cracks and sizzles.

I want you to know that if you ever took the words I say
With a grain of salt they would
Taste sweeter than they did
As they came out they tasted like
Vomit after fellatio.