-poem for mac miller-

Death is everywhere.

It lives in my cells
and yours. They incinerate
themselves to bring more life.
Even the Oxygen we breathe
is toxic, bonding our deaths and our lives.
We breathe just to die.

Our heroes are dying.
Too much death too soon
I am full of it up to my eyes.
Spirits are next to me. I can't see
them but unmistakable
the feeling of their presence.

Swimming in endings
is it possible for the world
to fill with the souls of the dead?
Maybe that's when the singularity will occur
and the black hole will swallow
our galaxy and spit it out
on the other side
to flip the hourglass
the other way.

Do drugs to ease
the feeling of the dead all around
but just know when you come back
they will still be here, as will you.
I'm listening to your songs on repeat
today because you're dead,
four years younger than me
how was that enough time?

I won't ask why.
There's no inverse of the equation,
no way to turn it inside out
for an answer.
It happens to us all
but it's hard to know whether we mourn
the loss or the fact we're still here.

The world scares me more and more
so tell me how am I supposed to ascend
when the reaper looks more and more
like a long lost friend.
I guess the reason I'm still here is
I know the end is a beginning. A circle
has no beginning. The end of me
is not the end of I Am.

All I can do is breathe a sigh and reel
off a list of clues that will breadcrumb
you somewhere not here but maybe closer
to home, to Pittsburgh of the bridges
reaching from one shore to another,

to me, to you.

-sept 7 2018, seattle wa-