'Til Death Does Us Part Poem by Michael Timothy Rose

How do I bury
what is not dead,
but alive inside of me?
How do I kill
what still lives and moves and wanders? What sometimes
Quivers and expands and speaks? What, when silent and sleeping,
exhales and inhales its life
alive inside of me?

The answer
is that-
You do not.
It is wrong, if not
impossible. And, for me, especially,

it is impossible, where I

Move with tired feet,
I crawl
to keep my hands' faith
from any wanting in my chest,
to keep my hands away
and bound from the compression of diamonds
held heavily like a thousand years within my breath,
a coal mine residing
deep within
the endless weeping of my chest.