Grief is feminine. I greet her, an old acquaintance
with whom I grew up, grew askew
who pulled at me my entire youth, dragged me
into a bottomless darkness. So often I fell.

Sometimes I would lie there, paralyzed by a fear
that seemed to come from nowhere, and yet so real.
L’enfer c’est les autres but hell is heaven
compared to what sometimes rages in my chest.

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It’s the music that saved me
on long days underneath the roof window
of a drafty row house on a street
where no one wanted to know me.

At night I dissolved into crowds
like sugar in coffee. Invisible
but everywhere my shadow slipped
along facades, over thresholds where riffs

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