we of the silent roar

the patient legions

write up poems 

in pen ink and typewritten

traipse the terrain of our

hearts’ travails

without a lantern

without gasoline

we yell privately

and the echoes of our screams
forge canyons

we're lost at the end

but know the land

we've no love that’s real

but all love that is not

we knead and ply fantastical

because Great Pain’s made us strange

we covet their soft limbs

their lolling eyes

their wet lost tongues
like ghosts, phantomly 

in and out of that song about the streets

of their town
poets and healers and singers
like thread

saddle the valley of the seam of loss

we’d like for them to rejoin and

pull back and laugh at this

gross body of life, breathing

and expiring and loving and losing

we’d sew them together if we could

keep oceans and oaks in their words

keep forests and dark in their words

for them to look out and see another

to be seen and know they’re here

before we recede back

to our own chairs 

high in the wind

roll and unwind, racked

at the odyssey of our own mourning.