You are poetry

Shattered skull, fingers brushed against jaw-bone

legs tangle-gether

rhythmic bone bone bone

crippled in

piling calcium crush.
Your rhyming poses –

arched backs, stacked femurs

your ribs are beat.

You’d clatter if you could move.
Baltimore

I see myself in its decay

recognise time passing outside my body.
Collapsing roof

blown out windows

vines run me over

I am suffocated. Reclaimed.
I am the big-hit search term

‘ruin porn’.

I am a bridge built but never used,

an overpass to nowhere.
But you, lovers.

You are swept away on nothing

like words from mouths,

like been-said, like breath.
My body is abandonment, but

you are poetry.

Your rhyming poses

swept away by six thousand years of

                                                                     air.
My wish for erasure

stands solid among

the rubble.