The Other Absence

Where there was a fairy was
Right below the surrender tree
(You can't imagine all the kisses that still buzz about the air! )
Who clearly seemed to summon me
The way they trick you from your soul
And you dare to ask me did I go?
Might as well try to drag me by a sleeve
From the darkness there that ever was
"My old friend," I say, "My home
Is thatta way! And I don't live alone!"

Walking in an air turned ocean water
And it slides against my skin
Animal suddenly shorn of fur
As naked as it gets
Humble as a little raincloud
That just slid across a Rocky Mountain peak
To a desert hungry for it to land
Until the whole storm left behind screams
At once for his return
He said, "Everyone whoever lived,
Where else did they go but here
Where no one ever is?"

And when the fog drops straight and hard
As a tombstone onto the California coast
And even Navy Seals can't see 12 feet in
With goggles that  cost us all billions
I head in easy as a library, just as grey
As minor government buildings, inked
With so much of what we slung as true.
My scared old friend shakes his head,
"Death is where you want to travel?"
Maybe I shouldn't have laughed,
But , you know, we all accept absence
As the single tool of every war, and yet
It lives as signpost, as prophecy, as map
To the place we all go dead or alive
Simply to give in to all of it, and be
The thing beyond the you and me...
machinery of blood and planets
with which we gaze upon it,
puzzled so by the endlessness
our flesh cannot accept as family.