1.
the public thinking 
that he was 
one of the good ones

opposed
his own idea of himself as
snapped bone

and his face at perpetual
war
with his faith

his doubt
busting out all over as if he
had become

movie musical month of June
as if he 
could be sanitized through

the magic
of popular art bestowing genius
upon monsters

in part because they
expect
monstrosity in their geniuses

because it keeps 
all the people who aren’t monsters 
from uncovering

their own genius

2.
when his ghost
was laid away at last
and the myth
of who he’d been
was permanently
supplanted
with the truth

when they filed
his work away at last
in a locked drawer
reserved for what was once
thought genius and now
was forensically reviewed
for sinister clues

though he could not breathe 
any longer 
he held what little vapor he still had 
tight within
and told himself it was long past time
to set this right
fade away to reincarnate perhaps
at some better time

I look for the bodies of people I love or have loved 
in photographs posted on the Internet by our friends
and those who are friend-adjacent, for want of a better term;

I am not one of those who believe that photographs
capture the souls of those being photographed, and I
thank all the myriad gods of a plethora of religions for that;

I could not bear it if that were to be true, thinking
of our deep affections still haunting those imprisoned in paper
and ink or in pixels and sparks, ready to go dark in an instant;

but still there is this small hope that perhaps one of these snaps
will stir a feeling in me that I do not find easy to reach on my own,
that an image of a known body will tweak me in the soul 

and push my empathy out front from where it hides
in a pocket made of armor I keep tucked close to my belly;
that the image of a body I love and respect and care for

might remind me of the days when I felt that
for what once rode within my own body, what I pray
is still there, raging at me from inside this shell, crying out

that there is love and hope and joy and risk-affection
still in the world, that pain and weakness are what a body must yield to
but the spirit inside need not ever yield; 

I seek for images of bodies I have known
hoping they miss me, the me I was when they knew my body
and saw it and welcomed me for what I was inside,

the me I do not know now though I am in the same body
I have had for all my time, the me that has changed 
from how it once was, the me that feels like it has slipped away.

The root,
leg grown
for depth and protection
against standing
so loosely on the surface
that one could easily fall
in any stiffer wind;

who has these now?
Whose roots are not 
shrinking, pulling free
of the earth?

Soil cracking, air
hardening. One good storm
away from toppling
for most of us.

Way of the world,
some say. Nature
is a cull, a cull is
a cleansing, a cleansing
makes new.

Holes left behind
preach a different sermon:

the drying out,
the crying out,
the soil holding
nothing

even as we dig in our toes;
a vain scramble
for purchase
we call

putting down roots.