Black Friday

Dishing out dollar bills
is not the way to healing

stockpile success in closets and drawers
drown the sickness you're feeling

in boxes, in things, instead
stack them high like bricks

until the faintest of breezes blows by
a house is made of matchsticks

into this land I sink myself
pouring in every drop of faith that I've got

the runoff is soiled, polluted
unable to soak it in, it pours out over the top

ruin
all for a day

poem start

Shadows insert themselves

thin sheets of carbon between layers

of intention, good clean plans.

Each letter strikes and leaves behind

a dark outline, a residue

recorded.

Dust on the fingers

incidental contact with the least expected, 

bodies come away marked

by a brush, not lightly brushed off.

There is no coming back, not

in the same way, never spotless again.

The neighbor who fell, whose eyes

went somewhere else entirely, who heard

me calling him back.

There was that time I called myself back.

An empty page, the clean white everything else

compromised.