Painting and Death

I’m killing my friends.
I’ve been yellowing their teeth,
graying their hair, washing
their veins to white and purple.
I pervert the cells
of liver and lung; colon and skin;
create ocean wrecks;
airplane disasters;
I root the senses in dementia.

Fast or slow – the quarrel is pointless:
If I can kill them, they live
and help me wear away that life.

Like a battery dying
and panicking about that,
it’s not real when my selves simply slough:
I’d rather kill them
and draw pictures of the night,
where light deepens the dusk,
snow dust glows in the opening woods,
becoming a picture of a waterfall,
fully chaotic.

Behind that veil is a table
and on it,
breakfast.

But it is late in the day
when I wake, stunned,
creaking from death-sleep.
I stretch or eat or not:
the routines have disappeared.
Breath goes in or out.
Sometimes, there are two squirrels
running the trees, chattering.
I sit, write letters for myself to you.

Odd, this life, killing,
and odd, as well, to die,
but maybe I’ll not be so stunned, then.