Weep, Weep

Weep weep for a week. Or two.

Or a period of certain years

in which time elongates

and disperses into disparate

particle renditions of each abstract

moment. Weep weep as the scar

of sky rises against a setting

sun, all the while illuminating

your day with a forced kind

of transparency, the feeling that

sunset is supposed to be significant,

as if it didn’t happen day after day

after day. Weep weep not for

the weak, whomever they are, not

us for we weep with the temerity

of thousands, with the huddled

collective push of Egyptian slaves

ground into dust with bones under Giza.

Weep weep for the time you’ve spent

wasted on figuring out what it was

you were weeping about in the first

place. Weep for sheep, considering

humans call them even dumber than cows,

although consider that at some point

in history sheep must have been less easily

herded. Weep weep for the fierce sheep

that diminished after the Ice Age, their distant

descendants the bighorn sheep of Montana.

Weep weep for the sheer fact that you can,

although in the range of human

emotions it tends to age and sag women’s

faces and aridify tear ducts to useless bags.

Where do tears go when you weep weep

for the extinct fierce sheep?

—Absorbed, absorbed into your face, they

paint crevices in the nasolabial terrain. Smokey

Robinson “The Tracks of My Tears.” drawn

into your face. So, weep, weep no more, fill an internal

whirpool. Save the weep weep for the future

loss that is sure to happen, don’t waste good tears

on the past, which ostensibly is dead and is only

kept alive by the determination of people to bring it

to reality by marking its life today. Fill your fonts

with the tears of the future, spread isolation

to the fountain of tears, declare a pox on salinity,

fill up your orbs with something else.