I don’t think I’ll write poems anymore.

Those turgid, ridiculous dinosaurs

The tiny peabrains, they never look up.

The dust-choked sun no transient hiccup.

In Utah, they’ve unearthed a chapbook.

Skeletal, of course, hardly worth a look

Unless you like your meat without blood

Like some academic with his stick deep in mud.

Then of course you are free to usher in

A stale cough.  It must get you off.

I don’t think I’ll write poems anymore.

I think I’ll write people and buildings, places unknown

The qualia of nations, the shape of empty spaces.

I’ll write a choir of grief at a funeral pyre. 

I’ll write it in the sky like a bird on fire

With the rush of the air like a supplicant’s prayer.

 I’ll write it in the dust we lie in, the dust we die in.