Fans Don't Cool

Hot night I sit on sweat

breathing cigarette smoke

that wafts from the ground

floor like fog across rocks.

My mind is hot split in, too

often revisited complaints

of he who does not listen

to reason or facsimilic truth.

The whir of the fan dulls

all sound from the street.

I do not hear the smoker cough

up the years he drags out.

The air moved into the room

is wet and full of the still

atmosphere that preexists

the storm that is sure to come.

I wipe the moist pebbles

off my brow and wipe my leg.

I will surely die second hand

stuck to my fretted glow.

the box

An inheritance

arrived in a box,

thousands of letters

and photographs

too heavy to carry.

In his journal

I was in third person.

He drank

himself to death

found days after

his heart exploded.

Then,

I did not

warn him

of his indulgence

blind to influence

to make a difference.

We were young, love

came like quicksilver:

willful      fragile.

We spent time,

his other time

wasted.

She calls every night

I am the connection

to a dead son:

did the box arrive, dear?

I don’t pick up, how

she never called him.

Now,

he stands in the corner

watching my sleep

safe from his demons

I suspect.

revised from an earlier version