Simon, today hurts more than other days. I ate a bagel
with smoked salmon, as if I could infuse my flesh
with smoke and drip this dull ache from my pitted bones. 
It doesn’t really work that way, does it?  I can smell
the wind on the day we found your note. 
It smells like your blood, Simon.  You thought
I wouldn’t have the courage to tell you that, right? 
Now I can feel masses of mountains stacked
behind my eyelids.  You used to tell me you could see the empty
fields carved into the surface of my marbled pupils
and I’m trying to hold your word in between my fingers
but you’re falling through the cracks of this sidewalk
and the stars exhale too fast and what was once my head
sitting on my throat is now my heart and I’m utterly
head over heels.  Hell, do I even get to say that,
since each day I walk over your grave?  Simon,
some of your life isn’t going to leave this small town
anytime soon- I walk past your favorite aisle
in the grocery store and that doesn’t exactly help me
forget you.  Each time, I have to buy a packet of brown
sugar; it makes me laugh.  And I know that you were afraid
of being forgotten, so I guess I’ll prove you wrong.
Simon, they’ll remember you- the way that we (tribes, gods,
colonists) remember what fire looks like, but more importantly the way
it scorches our cheeks as we stand there
because it’s so goddamn beautiful to destroy ourselves
with the things we fall in love with.  I know we’ve fallen
in love with fire at one point,
be it the fluttering slice of a candle or the acrid smell
of a wooden house crumpling to the earth, erupting
in spicy flames that pop and crack.  Please don’t forget that
in your second try.  You deserve more
than unfolded laundry, beetles; tucked into the folds
and burrowing into your mind as you slip into sleep.
Morbid, perhaps, but if you came back I don’t believe
you would get anything better than what you really had. 
(At this point, I can hear your voice laughing- “speak
for yourself” -but you’re wrong.)
Yes, I believe that you should have gotten glowing moths
with dried feathered wings in your locks of hair,
but nobody has that and you wouldn’t have been
blessed. We all have our infestations.
But as I started,
today is hard so I’m just digging for glaciers,
bleeding arctic suns and polar stars in this frozen ocean.