i think it hits you slowly the way you let the tide drink you in,
and when you bend your neck back you can still swallow the regret and remorse in small morsels down your throat
I don't know much about sadness. but I know enough about the sea
it takes a while before I can understand what draws me in- the (no, it can't be) the (you're lying) the (but I've never even said goodbye) the (it's too sudden) the (                 )
[the graying pauses between each phrase of the moon
and I just know
I know she is dying, cos

I saw it eat away at her skin first. the cells deteriorated. it metastasized into the thinned pockets of her bones and scaled around the wrinkled topography of her face and soon her voice was nothing but the hanging up of a phone we never rung, never said anything more than we needed to, then passed it along

until her brain fell apart and we burnt it so black we never wanted to recognize it again/ not the dimmed look in her eyes cos I know she smelled oblivion around the corner-the wind blew it in from the west and sifted sand through its fingers- we tasted dust and wet rock. I know she saw something else.

the storm had only just passed when the sirens began.

and I know she heard them wailing with the empty c***le shells pressed up against her ears but I think she confused the throbbing heart for the missing sound of her father

I thought about how he had stood here,where I am now, with the sand pulling his feet back and forth along the shoreline and the air thickening the lining of his fleshy throat, until the wavelengths of his pulse coaxed him further out-
I guess neither of them could help but listen.

their heads are still bobbing, just beneath the waves, with our fruitless buoys floating around them/ we had spent hours holding her hand but she still drifted away from us- a lithe body, rising upside the belly and into the deep,

we never gave up on her

march 23,2009. 1118pm: - the sky took her first.