After

I never feel so alive as when I am    
writing and have no right    
answer for what this means   
for the lives of others, how

to live in the after which after    
all means the now of our living   
together when together    
means death for all

those forbidden from   
entering the home so    
methodically built until after   
they are dead. Only 

after will locked doors    
swing amply open to   
admit the murdered    
into rooms of vast

crushed comfort, whose    
inhabitants eat and sleep   
on furnishings carved   
with corpses, stepping

with hospitable sorrow   
around the bodies of the   
dead, speaking dirges   
into the phantom

darkness. What happens 
in the quiet grave where  
the living make themselves   
at home, where noisily

they intend to thrive, where  
the poem itself concedes 
to suffering so it might persist   
in blazing against it.