Apartment by the Sea

I try to quarantine my grief

But the owners fly down death’s alley

I can’t cross over one-way streets

My new tenant their raging silence

The old ones, rat and roach, squeak and bark

They wish to speak about dying

We don’t converse

Not only the living are alive

Your statues shed more tears than your leaders

My walls tense to love, loss, pain and

Emotions you’ve not named

I was built by beings you don’t imagine

To feel you in full

Silence is not quiet

It sprints and hurls itself

Away from the furious sea

That now drifts and ebbs, but will rise

To a peaked, rolling mountain

You will think this great wave a cloud

I will transmit your last fears

For then they will be mine