"We had been sailing—but the edge of the world was
nowhere in sight."– Ocean Vuong

Tell it this way: I have been sailing through hope–
yet the edge of despair is nowhere in sight.
I am not a perfect metaphor for an ampersand,
I keep falling into a dream in which I am a hill
swallowing a mountain. If you must know,
I am a white seraphim whetted with dark liquor–
an aubade to a city of angels burning in a furnace.
And here, in the walls of my room are crickets
eating the solid silence I have built, their chattering: 
a choir of tractors demolishing the chapels of quietude 
constructed in the hamlet of my mind. Say I, offspring 
of loneliness, foreshadow of misery.  Today, to an island 
of solitude I sojourn, my fate entrapped between the fangs of time. 
I am weathering away like a tragic actor in a scene 
of disillusionments. In an Achilles timeline, I am staggering 
on soft feet–my body a pillar of fractured rhapsodies.
Desacralize the human flesh and it becomes a muddy jacket 
inflated with helium. Somewhere in a sad hole, I am sing(k)ing 
into depression, the ballads ricocheting like arrowheads off 
the temple of an armor. O Death, with broken fingers, I play 
your favorite song under a gunshot sky–a murder of crows piercing 
through the skin of night. Snap. There is blood where there should 
be light and like a moth, I lap every bulb off my fingers.
Perhaps we can unname a dead thing alive. 
But if you must know, I have been sailing through hope–
yet the edge of despair is nowhere in sight.