I'm not the only one who'll keep you up at night.

Out on the road the pin-lights of twin cigarettes,

the risen stars. Your house has mold in the basement, eats

anarchist books. Here a baby was born on the floor of

the big room. I know her. Her mother wrote weeks ago, asked

me: did you have a bunny that died? Not quite. At night

I try to come quietly without disturbing the darkness past

mountain shapes and moths pressed against the glass, up

the ladder I built to the loft where I'm sleeping, hand out in the void,

reaching back to New York to hold my brother's hand off the edge

of the top bunk. Limp wrist, fingers forming the long incantation

of childhood. Warding and inviting. Him out like a light. Do we go

out like lights, I remember me asking. His wrist branched between

me and our green plastic stars. In your house the ghosts

of my forefathers come and stand over my body at night. Their ghost

spines stretching into the rafters, their ghost breath

fogging the lenses of my eyes. They come passing your forefathers

on the rough stairs. The bastards. Come quietly as ghosts to ask me

why these mountains? why this house? why this friend? At the law firm my brother

sleeps under his desk, his hand holding mine in the heavenless darkness.

My forefathers want me to understand: we're born alone, we die alone, like distant stars.

My naked forefathers, cord blood, and other blood, matted in the ancient

gray fur of their ghost bellies, whining, we're born alone, we go out like

the bedroom light! I can barely hear them for the chorus of gut fauna singing

behind our abdomens. For the crickets, moths, mountains, eukaryotes as numerous

more numerous than stars. The ghosts of their own e.coli singing in the vaunted black

halls of my intestines, through my thin walls, from the living dark: we did not

die alone, we never died.