The Passing of the Mime

This night is too near a solstice
For a crouching, hallowed cool and
Evening settles like a crackling season

Here I read poems about aged ladders
Loitering beside trees without fruit
Here we sidle up to fierce loneliness

He is a surviving kind of friend
Who only rattles his bars as
Midnight sprints unaccompanied past

And a soundless, subzero moon reminds me
Meticulous death is glorious art
He isn't jarring, nor perverse any longer

He holds my hand, invisible as we
Cross the God-loving street, and I am
Sweating underneath the November snow

And this, this eating thing
Digesting the remains of my day
Reels me in with a distorted magnetism

The ink on my shoulder is a
Vomitous misrepresentation of a
Life spoiled, too ripe in the sun

But in this cage the ultraviolet leaves me
And a bundled childhood is my shield
And the mime's temperature and mine are

A similar number, plummeting in disrepair
In that room where windows leak dollars
And love festers, just the terminal choice I made

29 July 2009

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