The Facebook Elegies
       

Easy to see, when Robin Williams died, why
we mourned on social pages the touched friend

we did not know. Or knew the way one knows,
by the hair on our necks, a storm will come

and make our sleep a little easier and deep.
Surely the hole in us was evidence earth had

moved, a share of us was elsewhere, and so
we paid our respects, laid blame, confessed

the loss we feel when a night wind carries us
to pastures more stoned with graves than any

common yard. When he took his life, he took
the orphans of our suicides to the glass-gated

public space where selfies link into a puzzle.
For the big picture has no eyes, as we have

none for it, though it surges a cold sea of light
behind the faces we abandon. To each late post,

the insomniac who dreams, awake, because
a body must. I cannot tell you why. I can only

step through self-important halls of the capitol
or some such emptiness where all are invited

to feel at home, and no one does. Laughter
here is large. None alone and no one truly seen.

Which is how fame must feel as it leaves home
in the middle of night to walk the foreclosed

streets of Brooklyn. The genuine lies somewhere
just off screen, eclipsed in idolatries whose debt

to the nameless of their context tells me, I believe
more than I know. Why not befriend the dead

and funny who blow through the room to give
our morning papers wings. Who can blame you

if you lay your head beside the head on the table.
Or stare into the tiny mirrored stranger in his eye,

if only to invite the alien home to share your loss.
Who is not a creature of the wilderness, each face

frontloaded with all the features of desire. Child
of permission. You hear what wild creatures hear,

called, as one more heavy head in need of sleep,
to blacken the glass. And watch your ghost reflection rise.

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Copyright © 2021 Bruce Bond All rights reserved
from The Cincinnati Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission