A Closeted Grief, Anonymous

A random algorithm

played one of your songs today.

I listed to it once,

twice,

three times before I stopped to ask myself why

we push on bruises to see if they still hurt

(even as the color fades,

the red of hemoglobin becomes anoxic,

breaks down

to blues and yellows

before fragmenting into reabsorption)

never once remembering:

the urge to push

means we are still bruised.