When they tell you he died peacefully in his sleep
You’ll think to yourself, “how the hell would they know?”
you might say it aloud too.
After all, the siren song of night that rings in the echoless black
rouses the old and calms the restless young.
But his sleep is a silent grief
a lonely suffering lost now to the blissful dawn.
You’ll catch yourself not saying “was.”
His sleep was a silent grief
Now it’s a blinking cursor and a midnight fiction
that his gasping and grasping at life
was out of habit, reflex, instinct
Those base turmoils of the mind pacific.
When they say he died peacefully, you’ll think
that they just awoke to calm seas
that only the fish know of the turbulent tumult of storms
that swept without breaking the surface its final cacophonous tune
that the fish can’t sing.
They’ve already sank
or drowned.
