Every Poet Needs a Nightingale Poem

At my age I don’t want to think about nightingale,

I don’t even want to use it in a poem, I don’t want to

say fuck either, but I do at times read into it.

At my age I don’t want to think about nightingale, the

moon that has split spilling its mercury across oceans

of poetic Prose—a bright hole in the sky I celebrate alone,

a single headlight, a signal to the marine bristle worm

not to breed in its glory—the cruelest of moons, a cruel

thing to do to a friend or neighbor, someone dying

to write poetry, is to buy them a calendar, hang it

on their wall or put it on the bedside table. At my age

I don’t want to think about nightingale or that calendar,

the one showing the cycles of the moon month to month,

a reminder to the days of blood loss love when that’s all

you every wanted, all that slips away into the night.