Black Box

Corpse

In the photograph of my memory the fire moves, entropic.

The wheel spins jauntily, the wind whistles outside fearsomely.

But he is perfectly still. perfectly.

It is wrong.

He was moving at the time

with all the little tells that life defines.

But in my memory he is dead, he is gray and unmoving.

In my memory I am sitting beside a corpse

I love too selfishly to bury.

It is more a waking dream than a memory.

The things just below my mirrored surface amalgamate and rise

To be a man and a love and a bird and all these things dead.

Shards when assembled resemble my own darkness.