In your diary,
you’ve drawn little apricots
with faces: smiling, laughing apricots,
melancholy apricots–
little Spartan apricots driving
little Persian apricots off
black Greek cliffs.
On page 63, your daily apricot
is missing, and I like to think
he is off on some adventure,
lost in the labyrinthine underbelly
of hospital sprawl
your passage describes.
Every apricot in June shrinks,
sketched in fainter penstrokes:
ragged apricots until
the cusp of July
and a final apricot.
Ghost-eyed, half-formed,
he is staring up at me,
but no longer seeing.
This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.
