Time
is a curve
with a caveat.
Love can’t stop it,
pause it, or posit
a theory of
recursive pasts.
Baby: Ain’t a entity
that lasts.
Carnations go mum,
tea turns cold,
all bright stars
become black holes
and even
paradise paroles
its tethers. Like
the man
who coos always.
But means for never.
The Run-Down
Cold, but she never wore overcoats.
Tired, but her cot was rotten and worn.
At a quarter to ten she tried every door.
She had two dry eyes and a mute, mocking pout,
And six dire doubts and seventeen heavens,
And a Jesus who wouldn’t commute her sentence.
She was taxed in a bracket and tossed in a bucket.
She cheated on husbands and sought out her exes.
They didn’t quite hate her so they didn’t quite hit her.
She sloshed through mornings with tonic and vodka.
And her coughs were chronic, her symbols iconic,
She rationed her reason in droppers and thimbles.
She wept when she walked and the law tried to bust her.
The library shushed her and slapped her with fines.
Her fingernails spiked like tines on a fork.
So she sated her sorrows in sewers and brothels
And hated the answers her brothers denied her.
She throbbed like a wound that swallowed its knife.
And her butters were margarine, her jewels were paste.
The worse the poison, the sweeter the taste.
