Murder at 3 a.m.

Against twin ceramic bowls
turned empty, turned over,
fading branches thread
from the tree of costly knowledge
rooted in her eyelash horizon
seeking a moisture long siphoned
up and unknowably away.

Each blank pause
where a blink should shutter
refracts streetlights and answers, instead
as he susses out
the places her pupils fled to,
sleepily scoping behind lenses,
wondering what she was
before mortis stretched
its canvas tightly purple,
and why bodies never wait ‘til morning.