my dead

My Dead

Sometimes it seems my dead
are looking into the back of my mind
and see the world that way:
the far side of the brain where I
have not yet closed myself
a priest-hole place – where what is vaster, uglier
lives its deep-sea creature life
That’s where they congregate.
The pretty thoughts I send them hardly touch
their vivid flux –
so inchoate they are, so far adrift
from who I think they were.
They’re growing ever otherward,
their silence in me just my own deaf ear
to their intimate oracle.

Published in Raceme (no.9 ), spring/summer 2020