• There is a note for me playing hide-and-go-seek
    in between the wall and the hotel bed,
    but the author is done playing
    and driving home

    because continuing after losing is too hard,
    people are still breathing and posing for photographers,
    popping balloons, asking for names or numbers
    and living, and sometimes life would be

    so much easier if they didn’t,
    if the world stopped the way a clock
    doesn’t tick after it’s dropped off a balcony,
    lying there as a small jumble of twisted metal and wooden splinters,
    a cracked face with fingerless hands

    and all blessedly, gloriously still.