The Facebook Elegies

Easy to see, when Robin Williams died, why 
we mourned on social pages the touched friend 
we did not know. Or knew the way one knows,
by the hair on our necks, a storm will come
and make our sleep a little easier and deep.
Surely the hole in us was evidence earth had
moved, a share of us was elsewhere, and so 
we paid our respects, laid blame, confessed 
the loss we feel when a night wind carries us
to pastures more stoned with graves than any 
common yard. When he took his life, he took 
the orphans of our suicides to the glass-gated 
public space where selfies link into a puzzle. 
For the big picture has no eyes, as we have 
none for it, though it surges a cold sea of light
behind the faces we abandon. To each late post, 
the insomniac who dreams, awake, because
a body must. I cannot tell you why. I can only 
step through self-important halls of the capitol 
or some such emptiness where all are invited 
to feel at home, and no one does. Laughter
here is large. None alone and no one truly seen. 
Which is how fame must feel as it leaves home 
in the middle of night to walk the foreclosed 
streets of Brooklyn. The genuine lies somewhere 
just offscreen, eclipsed in idolatries whose debt
to the nameless of their context tells me, I believe 
more than I know. Why not befriend the dead 
and funny who blow through the room to give 
our morning papers wings. Who can blame you
if you lay your head beside the head on the table.
 



Or stare into the tiny mirrored stranger in his eye,
if only to invite the alien home to share your loss. 
Who is not a creature of the wilderness, each face 
front-loaded with all the features of desire. Child 
of permission. You hear what wild creatures hear, 
called, as one more heavy head in need of sleep,
to blacken the glass. And watch your ghost reflection rise.

Read more from Issue 17.2.