How to Be Alone for the Rest of Your Life

First you must believe you have
telescope eyes that can smell
the future. Next, you populate
that time- not-yet with absences.
Name each one and give them
faces of people who have left

you already. Build this city,
this lonely city, from skin cells,
old love letters never returned,
and the memory of phone calls
you will not get to answer again.
Stir the wind up with this dust;

stir up all the dust that is dust,
that is what ashes become. Yes-
lay there in your sad bed, imagine
every bad thing, possible or not,
that is going to happen to you.
That you most certainly deserve.

At this point you have cursed
yourself enough. Bone links
and blood links; subconscious
making consciousness; bricks,
mortar, but not in that order.
A lonely city falling upwards.

You have presented yourself
with the key to this ruin inside;
you are sitting in a graveyard
of things that have yet to die.
as if a small, cold room could
be trusted to tell your future.