There is an old man who
lives in the crack of a window
high above the entrance of
the decrepit skeleton
that some found livable.
Before the explosion and the blood—
oh God, the blood—
and the suicide they claimed it to be
shook the earth and the skeleton
and his brain
hasn’t stopped, because he can’t
hold it in his hands and
tell it what to think, like they did to her
when they took her away.
Because it wasn’t a suicide.
Because they were happy and laughing and
not smouldering from a charred black fist
clamped down onto their stomachs.
There was no reason to be unhappy.
Absolutely none at all.
Yet there he breathes and sleeps,
in the crack of the window
she will appear in
when she comes home
to patch up the brokenness of the skeleton
and the window
and then he can finally move and live
without cutting himself
on the edges of everything he knows.

Twenty years, that’s
two decades of not twitching a muscle, because
if he does then she might not come back, but
he knows she will.
Only because she said he was
the blanket around her fist when she
punched that wall, and
maybe he couldn’t shoot their cruel words out of the air
like clay pigeons, but
at least he was there to tell her that
fake birds aren’t worth crying over.
She shouldn’t have wanted to be like them,
the dresses, the boyfriends, the makeup that
dripped and bled
onto her life when she drank, until
there was no difference between her and them.
That’s when she was happiest.
The sun made her angry.
Love made her angry.
He made her sad.
There was only one thing that made her happy
after they tapped her life dry.
He was dreaming of an empty house
built of bones and cold and despair when
she gave him a sad-angry, happy-in-the-eyes smile—
the epitome of a ghostly departure.
He didn’t know, he didn’t wake
and until his haggard and resistant death
seven thousand
three hundred
and five days later,
it wasn’t a suicide.