Another vulture is up in this sky, eating the sun

       into oblivion, another man is drinking himself into death,

gulping this wine of absence, his tongue, dug

      into a burrow. I look towards this body, wanting this refreshing

touch of a zephyr. A man, a lion, undone into a sacrificial

     lamb, slaughters himself into death; a crevice lives in his chest,

& there is no hand to replenish it with sand.

     The ghost in the body channels itself into a piano and refuses

the hands a song. I put a sugar cube in my mouth

      & it ferments into a sweet song wet with sweet sorrow — one

that drowns into a dream, or into an apparition.

       I’ve lived inside a canopy of my own fears, I chisel them

into laughter on scary nights, & I sculpt

     a meadow of fresh plants for a face, a smokescreen for the rumble

of my thoughts. I gather the cold in my body

      on my lips, hoping to break this shiver down, but men

do not shiver, & in my dimly lit room,

      my tendrils don’t stretch, they dry and crumble. My laughter,

a language I manipulate my depressing

      moments into — Na man I be, ọkùnrin mà ni mí, nwoke bilie,

Kai kammana meji. Yesterday, Francis drowned

      himself. He poured gasoline into his unshared anxiety. Who will

listen to a man with muscles? Men don’t get depressed,

      until they flood themselves into the mouth of a river, or offer

themselves to gravity from the top of a cliff.