Presumptive Elegy for Ken
       

Your whole name I've forgotten and face
which was acne-scarred or burned
but your throat, punctured by a tube,
I remember that. I remember
everything was pain. Was fear.

I never wanted to become you.
Your body. Your bent arms. Lungs
that were no good, with
clots of phlegm filled up.

I remember the hallways stank,
as everywhere stank, we
stank, laughing and half-dead
in our numb bodies,
and because you wanted to be one of us,
nurses found you
and siphoned from you thick mucus.

I never knew how much the world
was made up of dysfunction.
The woman in line,
in her arms a sack of ice,
smiles, says, praise God,
and just like that
the world around us has been changed.

I don't know how
not to dream at night
of vines of black fire
climbing the walls.

I don't know how
to free my heart
from this sick air
and stop singing
songs that are older than me.

Ken, from your door
I watched you
learn again how to smoke
through a red tube
a cigarette in a wire mount.

I want help
understanding your death.
I want help
weighing in my mind
the two gigatons of ice
that slid off the coast of Greenland
into the sea.

Everything is burning. Is melting.
Is running down.

Maybe you're not dead.
That much
should be possible
and at your window is a tree
burning up with furious summer.

Just imagine, would you,
how close we came
to annihilation.

How epic is our brokenness.
How complete.

I don't know you. I'm not speaking to you,
right now. I want
to say that I am alive.

That what I want to say is real, is true, is always.

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Copyright © 2021 Paul Guest All rights reserved
from The Southern Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission