It's time to be quiet again—

to listen to my bones settle on their last frail pillars,

to listen to the wind rustle up every fragment of silted letters

dredged out from the organs of my body, abandoned now

where someone pokes and prods about as if they were no longer my stage.

But this is not about surrender.

This is not about the empty seats of my ribcage.

No one fills in the dark of spare time

with preoccupation of a battle no one is ever winning.

Only one kind of beauty: the transition that is not a transition,

the stasis of a corporal permanence and the space that surrounds us.

I've never so badly not wanted it, never so badly not wanted

the rusty construct of my veins, a single, wrought iron staircase,

or a railroad stapled to the sky.