Night of the Following Day
The person I went to sleep
as wasn’t the same person
I woke up as, half-drowned
in sweat after traveling
on motherless roads all night,
seeing plants and animals
bombed into submission,
families forced to dig
their own graves at gunpoint,
tears evaporate on contact
with the air, only for me
to arrive some six hours later
back where I started
but feeling barely present,
like I was still miles and miles away
from the redwing blackbird
on the black branch.
*
A La Descartes
I felt the tightness in my chest that usually presaged a panic attack, and first thing in the morning, too. But that’s me, always anticipating something that might never happen or that perhaps already has. When I walked into the kitchen to make coffee, I was just this side of hell. The chalk outline of a body had been drawn on the floor. A sulfurous smell as of the damned lingered in the air. With the times on the clocks on various appliances in conflict, there was much I could doubt. Instead, looking out the window at the sky, I said to myself, “I think it’s going to rain, therefore I exist.”
*
Howie Good’s latest book, Frowny Face (Redhawk Publishing, 2023), is a synergistic mix of his prose poems and handmade collages. He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.
