Space Music
BY MARK KYUNGSOO BIAS
Lately, life is ordinary.
My words are mechanical over dinner plates
at social gatherings. The party. The people. I can’t digest it.
*
On the news, the anchor speaks a massacre.
The body count climbing as the microwave
beeps. Then an infomercial for bathrobes.
I tiptoe around the screaming
engine.
*
The air is in flux with the mind.
The heart and its jurisdictions are erased.
*
My answer to the inevitable
question: I am okay.
*
The dying are never saying goodbye
because it takes something from the living.
Everything orbits the next delusion.
Already dead, but still in transit.
*
The sickness does not enter. I step into it, leaving
my footprints at its teeth.
I am afraid of what the air will do to me.
*
With his last breath, my grandfather says, lunker.
A lake of wine, cedar bark, cigar smoke. He revisits and vanishes.
*
I am having one of those mornings
when I place the past inside a box
and place the box on my desk, waiting
for something to happen.
*
I am vicious,
laced with death like everyone else.
*
Darkness falls over everything except the front yard where
a square of light opens the grass.
*
Down the hall, the past is barking at the front door.
The hall becomes a river to wade, a smear of color.
