Would there be no stopping the delirious draws of unfinished breaths, or the muted sighs that stutter out from an empty lover’s nest? Where could there be enough to fill a bath to soak the ache of flesh and bones and ward away the winter air, when the spout of kin just whines with tepid drips?
Was our birthright joy forever stalked by sleepless shades?
Caught in the damning echo of some hooded ancestor’s tirade?
Our gnawed-up sleeves’ threads tangled when misplaced on the loom of Penelope’s tear-full age?
Or was it God or gods or an ill-chanced draw of humanistic fate
who called forth the titans’ wake? who ripped the seams where nightmares grazed? And propped up all these ugly signs that point the wandering on and on to overcrowded swamps with stinging flies and birds’ graves, to war-torn dunes of meaning-empty waste, to city streets all stained and caked with smog and pharmaceutic pastes, where rusting pipes bring tainted drinks and funnel to our ears through one-way mazes the drowning wail of the ghost-world’s yolk, all lost, all bargain-folk who coin and claw to be let in with phony stubs and frightened grins
to the last embrace.

but time has torn for us the never-ending end of days
a few are born who hide behind the iris of their ever-scanning gaze
a wisps’ promise that’s forged from secret lists and make-believe- a special kiss
from where they find the wish to swim against the drain of days when crossing streets with runway cars and grazing lips with malice-scars.