friday, december 7
hope is best understood as pathology
the kind of thing your favorite poet
might have described as a "disturbance
of the central nervous system"
somewhere tonight
her breath is as ragged and hot
as its echo in your fevered memory
while you lie in the darkness
of a rented room, dreaming
of reconciliation
but in the morning,
no angel will have come
to roll this stone away
and she is not walking out to the garden.