Nonkilling 6 | Hunger - How To Dress Well

Winter raging

The color gone

Hands were blue and cold

A recitation

I slowly read you Tomb for Anatole

He was eight years old

A dead child is no

Occasion for a song

Where did I go wrong?

When they say face facts, disobey that

There’s singing still left to be done

They still can’t name that fragrant

Wind rolling off a corpse

Until the day that you play back the tape that you made

Record your mother saying every word

Pronounce the gray that the rains had brought over the sun

Like a veil to suffocate the earth

(But hunger is first)

And I could feel in my body time rushing in

The way nothing must have felt when something started to begin

The way all of your sympathy taught me something was wrong

Secret disfortune, this cold, slow momentum

I remember snow

Saw it fall

Watched a child learn

The word 'nightfall'

And sleep because it’s sad

Or not sleep at all

I learned the word 'forever'

From Demerol

I let my body go

I feed the thaw

Like jumping off a cliff

But never falling

A dust finer than smoke

A memory in my throat

A flame that pulses cold

A faraway echo

And I could feel in my body time rushing in

The way nothing must have felt when something started to begin

The way all of your sympathy taught me something was wrong

Secret disfortune, this cold, slow momentum

And I could feel in my body time rushing in

The way nothing must have felt when something started to begin

The way all of your sympathy taught me something was wrong

Secret disfortune, this cold, slow momentum

I remember snow

Saw it fall

Watched a child learn

The word 'nightfall'

And sleep because it’s sad

Or not sleep at all

I learned the word 'forever'

From Demerol

I let my body go

I feed the thaw