If Michael Jackson’s nose hadn’t fallen off,
there would be snow, falling
from your hip bone. You’d lay
in your own identities like a selfmade angel

and wait until spring to ask, are we innocent?
You’ve dyed your hair, and I grieve

and grieve you again,
but you still don’t know
who you are. Long live Lazarus, the missing people
of New York City. Their prelude bodies

we pull from rivers
and into headlines – here, there is no water

for your many evolutions.
If Mona Lisa had eyebrows,
you could at least have been honest
in therapy. Elementary School You

plucks them into two
thin condolences, but now, bushy

brows are in. Here, you are not found
by anyone but yourself,
and there is still hope.
There is no bridge

to set fire to – darling,

my mother gave me nothing

and in return I gave you steel. O, motherly
bullet, childhood
inadequacy – and how tragic, how terribly
nothing at all: your dying is never

permanent, yet my grief
has doubled. Your ash falls like dice

in the car park behind the Consum –
you are a tree
without a forest, even though
I am here. You’ve dyed

your hair again, and I grieve
and grieve.