Place

Sunday Airstrikes

The incoherence of regret,

But I don’t know what you like yet.

Familiarity breeds contempt

Not really living is worse than death.

How to draw maps of places unseen

Places that you haven’t even dreamed

The weight of loss not yet put to bed

So flick the light switch inside my head 

Familiarity breeds contempt

The conquered lands and the great lament.

How to carve words you can’t even spell

And how to know if you still can’t tell

Sundays often encounter a freak wave of melancholy

Out of the clear blue.

A paralysing wave of grief that drowns.

There is refuge from it in sleep or stillness or not thinking or distraction.

A make shift camp in No Man’s Land.

A temporary shelter from something that I do not wish to ascribe sovereignty to.

Even if it farmed these lands for years and I gave it dominion and territory.

Its failed annexation of the self nearly led to nihilism and misanthropy.

I have pushed it back, but guerrilla like, it blindsides peace in seconds.

It’s failed insurgency, however now sporadic

Results in my mass firebombing of distant, forgotten tree lines.

Something is lost in the nondiscrimination,

Maybe a part of me each time.