The Weight of Unopened Things

Dawn breaks like dropped China,
and the coffee tastes of shitty pennies.
Six a.m. and already the day
could fold itself back into the dark.

You run your finger down
the vertebrata on your shelves, cracked leather,
gold letters rubbed on your back
and not one book of poetry grips.

Behind your sternum something waits
in a dim room full of red-soaked paintbrushes,
listening for the one voice that says:
here. begin.

But you crack to the prologue,
ink still smelling faintly of a ballerina’s shoe,
and there a seam in the map
you've been folding since you were five:

mouth to gut, lines to pavement,
a compass thrown across a river

What's left are the questions that don't fold flat,
the ones with no spine to close them:

Do you have anything left to ask Her,
the one who welded gravity to your groin
like a smith closing a horseshoe mid-swing?

Nothing can answer.

Back to the brush in my hand.