Ode to Murder: A Sonnet for the Sickly

Fingers on glasses meet cracks in denim

(sober scuffs a soaking wet wrist now has)

mincing skin as if in cookbooks, venom

sobbed and swept and swelled as easily as

 

a smooth and quiet vomit surfaces.

Everyone who has left someone was dead

with me there, with flat knives for circus kids

mocking our will to be killed over fed.

 

Wait for desertion on death row in spring,

ask him for holy, stolen souvenirs–

he’ll dig up letters in my handwriting

or tell you where we’d go to whine for beers.

 

Tell absence I thought of his kind mother,

and we can, at last, murder each other.