We are stardust—that means
we carry death in our bones. Our breath
blows out a galaxy long gone.

Hugging a friend and her seaweed hair,
kissing a stranger with hesitant beard,
feeling the first girl her soft skin melting on yours—
that was death too.

Death made quite an entrance—a drunk stepping
down the staircase, a body thumped, thawed, dissolved
into the ground.
It arrived quiet too, tiptoed—a giant hand flipping a calendar
onto the next page, adding numbers, wiping a windowpane clean
with ivory sleeves, shifting a foot ever so slightly
to hide the dirt.

Look the man on that high stage his huge body blocking
the sun. Hush he has yet to know
a clock is dragging his neck low.
We take him too. As he breaks down
into rotten bats and cooked porcupine,
we free ourselves from the end.
Stars reunion and the man under that bridge
reconsidered taking the leap again.
Each lost soul finds its body back
infest another organ white.
We gather to watch
a wild boar running across the Yangtze river
in a hollow January night.

***

Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay