She
said, I left the door open
until chickens came home to roost.
Your ghost, if I can speak of you
in such an insubstantial way,
would stubbornly refuse to appear,
no matter how hard we knocked
the table. She said, I won’t open
my door again, that part of my life
is over. I allowed as to how she
was awfully young to sequester
her irritability. She said, what can I do,
first of all, with all these chickens?
She said, I am haunted by better
things now, since I gave up on you.
I had no reply to this, trapped as I
am on this bardo, where the average
man loves too many eidolons,
where the average prisoner knows
only how to travel within. So, if I
could answer your Ouija, I would.
I would sing to you this song that I
wrote before my imprisonment,
the song about your impossible hips.
The song about physical love, a prayer.
