☀ Today's Poem: "Space Music" Mark Kyungsoo Bias

Lately, life is ordinary.
My words are mechanical over dinner plates

at social gatherings. The party. The people. I can’t digest it.

*

On the news, the anchor speaks a massacre.

The body count climbing as the microwave
beeps. Then an infomercial for bathrobes.

I tiptoe around the screaming
engine.

*

The air is in flux with the mind.
The heart and its jurisdictions are erased.

*

My answer to the inevitable
question: I am okay.

*

The dying are never saying goodbye
because it takes something from the living.

Everything orbits the next delusion.
Already dead, but still in transit.

*

The sickness does not enter. I step into it, leaving
my footprints at its teeth.

I am afraid of what the air will do to me.

*

With his last breath, my grandfather says, lunker.
A lake of wine, cedar bark, cigar smoke. He revisits and vanishes.

*

I am having one of those mornings
when I place the past inside a box
and place the box on my desk, waiting
for something to happen.

*

I am vicious,
laced with death like everyone else.

*

Darkness falls over everything except the front yard where
a square of light opens the grass.

*

Down the hall, the past is barking at the front door.
The hall becomes a river to wade, a smear of color.