It’s possible to forget a lot of things in the fullness of time:

My father’s eyes, the pale intensity of distance, how it all began.

I’m sleeping badly now. Dirt on a coffin, a credit card, loneliness,

Poetry streaming through my head, a disarranged message

That never has an end, am I writing it or having seizures?

We are all electric. I sense holes in my chest, panic in half hour moments,

Sun and shadow, the motion of leaves outlined through a window

And cast upon a kitchen floor adding up to something warm.

I can’t stop hugging my children and brushing their hair with my fingertips,

Saying things that don’t sound right to strangers,

As if I have slipped out of myself and away,

Leaving a fragmented self like those night poems of incoherence and sorrow

And panic and love: death comes in spasms.

Missing my father and being a father:

I think this must be what tears are like for me.

Blue electric tears from the mind’s eye falling over time forever.