Can you imagine taking someone’s life

fostered from the minerals of this earth

birthed through canals of red hot flesh

held against milk-warm breasts

Imagine the generations of women and

men still alive in the thickness of their blood

See the women tightening their corsets against

the morning light; watch the men drive scythes

across summer’s grasses; see hands slit the tender 

Close your eyes and 

sit again on that rickety plastic chair   

as the warm blueness of sky spans

across the lake and lingonberries.

Listen — hear nothing but the buzz of bees.

find your way back into the evening twilight 

where white apple blossoms glow like ghosts, 

black silhouettes of trees loom in a theater of dusk.

High above the city echoes the call of freest swifts.

This whole city again unconscious. Each night,

millions of dark windows and behind them

millions of strange bodies suspended in a nightly coma,

millions of strange minds suspended in the near-death 

of dreamlands.

As individuals we rise and shine 

then blank out collectively in waves. 

The bankers and teachers are all asleep now in their pajamas.

Behind the eyelids of journalists flicker the bombs of the day.