A Beatitude for the Coming Winter

take this treaty
and make sense of it,
make sense of wandering the streets of DC,
looking for a desert;
make sense of ghosts trapped in purple pills
and bottles full of codependent nightmares;
make sense of the impossibility of proving these memories
and say goodbye to curiosity and
hello to death by reason and reliability.

this rock for us has never been more than a party trick,
and without it maybe we can live again,
or at least die and die well,
rather than disappearing
right before our eyes.

this night can hold us
the way we never could.
endings are no sadder
then what has come before
or what will come after,
and if we can hold them softly,
they needn’t be sad at all.

-November 19, 2022

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