Scholars have asked, after seeing millions murdered,
“Why did the heavens not tremble?”

But they do,
each time another person dies

It’s just that our gaze is horizontal.

On January 15, 2007, at 1700 hours, Western Indonesia Time,
There was a sky quake so enormous
that people in several kampungs looked up

And before the soul completed the laborious process
of exiting its electro-shocked-from-within
body

the lamentations began

and they have yet to begin stopping.

Can a person cry forever?

There may have been 32 round torture burns
on the body

but it was too embarrassing to count precisely

they were small matters, rarely thought of

The daily brain attacks were paramount

A hungry person doesn’t dwell on past inconveniences.
They see goats walking and, in that, they see food.

When the trembling began,
there was, at last
the prospect of restful sleep

without the fear of waking up
having, frankly,
forgotten
who one is
or what the world is.

When, by 2200 hours—muscles straining from above—
the soul was finally extracted

they had to open the heavens archipelago-wide
to accommodate its enormous bulk

Some say that this world is too crowded simply because when people sleep on
mats

they are side-by-side,
like canned silverfish in a room
a family tree, horizontal, snoring

or because at breakfast time when passing out food
some fool somewhere made a mistake
and stacked too much in one house
leaving another with stomachs pulsing

But I tell you, if the world was too crowded before
—and it wasn’t
it sure isn’t now.

There’s vast open human terrain
because it is missing,
a soul the size of Indonesia