FELLOW FEELING

The headlines crash through the window, staining
the scrubbed. Want to see my indignation?

This is how I bury my complicity. My face
is all pixel and hum – a plea typed or else

fermented on a screen without a cord
or keyboard. Traverse the bones in a human

finger, count the likes between my near to guttural
trachea / my performative electrons. A number

is not the measure of the dead but the lapse
between the dead and the living, the bombed

and the bombing. Who counts and how
does the counting who? So the silicon

undresses itself and hovers. So the sky
radiates with the coldest prayer. Sand

heaves in the mind where underneath
proliferates a rancid empire. Opaqueness

sees what a mirror stares through. Spit and dirt
is softer than the news when it soaks up

human missingness called citizens of because.
Tomorrow, I will wake up next to an elsewhere

who tossed and turned all night. I will burn
from within a body I do not know.

The voice inside the radiator,
the testimony, writ backwards on my skin.