Heaven is the certainty that you will be avenged
I know I know the kingdom is not fair
but it’s what I have a montage of red and a mitosis
of knuckles I’m not sure how you could expect me
to love anything Ain’t no question
sadness is regal like that
golden and replaceable once I wanted
a lineage of identical men once a mouth soft and hot
as the quickest way that gold can hurt you You see
a pattern yet? I practice the want of nothing and fail
I’ve been shown how ugly I can be
when I am invisible
I don’t believe in yesterdays
The throat of loneliness? Straddled with my knife
I press my hands to my face and the lament is a valley
the light sags through What do you do when you have
lost Everything? Rewrite the history of Everything
I don’t like my smile because someone told me I didn’t like it
Now I am gorgeous in all the languages I mothered
Flex the antonym of Missing I avenge myself
Stretch my hands I orphan my grief for the living and it is beauty
ain’t no question I monarch
the lonely I my own everything now I miss my love and
it is an American grief I strike the smell from nostalgia
cut my memory to spite my country What is the odor of nothing
but my dominion in want of excess I grin and pillars of bone flower
into sawed-off crowns say I flex the light and the light flexes
heat shimmer unfurling like a bicep my lust a mirage
where the body is merely a congealing of the river I can feel it
slowly drifting away from me The world I knew is gone
and getting more gone and my anthem populating my nose
with an abundance of salt I slip the shroud over the life I named
and forget I belonged to someone once My soverign's face is a riot
of diamonds whining This will be a beautiful death and I am free
and gorgeous and desperate to never have to miss anyone again
I rock the jeweled shroud become the bride of my own sad light
Copyright © 2018 by Julian Randall. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 3, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.