My father is standing in a field of poppies
and I am weeping under a tree
The field is a photograph and the tree is nothing
Forgive me I’m a little lightheaded
and it’s just that I am weeping
and the poppies won’t bloom for me
The tide is coming in faster than I can walk back to the house
and when I look up at the sky I can’t see blue
I usually bring my umbrella with me
when I know it’s supposed to rain in the afternoon
but today the rain came in the form of a bus
at 6am while I was still lying in bed
My bookshelf is top heavy and reeks of poetry
The kind that smells like warm skin
and Monday evenings spent wearing headphones
My bookshelf is missing a bookend
and I keep loading books on one edge
wondering why they tumble off the other
My chest stings in the way that I imagine peeling
dry cement from your skin feels like
I’m pumping fresh blood into my veins
and staring as it pours out of the open wound in my foot
My metaphorically bloody foot is in my mouth and
I’m choking on all the reasons why I can’t just buy a new bookend
And today it was not supposed to rain
but there was a nail tacked in the wall
that’s fallen on the carpet that I’ve stepped on
and there’s blood on my foot again and now I’m weeping
under nothing but an empty hole in the wall where
a photograph of my father standing in a field of poppies used to be