I found the poetry book in the clearance bin.
Your book, Dan.  From Jean.
Once you'd underlined passages and turned down pages.
And now, here it is, with Jazzercize and Wham.
That strange smell, a C.S.I. cross of cat lady house and moss.
What path took it here?
Your notes, still visible in the margins.
Did your love of verse die, or did you?
Your belongings piled into a box without thought
With texts deemed of no value.
Or did age make you lose interest in words
As the everyday beat-down blues hit?
The baby, the bills, gutters and grass...
Was Jean an old lover, discovered at last?
Fini avec Jean.  With  poetry.  With the escape to Paris.
What books interest you now, Dan?
The mundane mechanics of fixing a toilet?
Or do they beckon you yet; does Lord Byron still tempt?
Like the ice cream hidden, but not forgotten.
Should we ever meet, Dan, I have your book.
My own passages now, along with yours.
We can escape together.

Of the five senses, touch was the first to go
When the rot set in.
Necrotic from disinterest; disused and numb,
A disconnected *****, a colony of one.
.
Then sound; your messages left unheard.
Just the tap tap tap of some manic mind.
No pause...just repeat; the eternal rewind.
Sleep starved, all words stick frozen in time.
.
For leading me into temptation; my gluttonous sins,
Taste and smell succumbed, then withered and died.
Staunch as a deacon, control finally mine.
The harvest ignored, bloated  on the vine.
.
Only sight eludes my metal fatigue.
The mirror much stronger, it haunts and it taunts.
Its warped funhouse images all I can see.
The bully I made...this cruel double of me.

I feed the hollow,
Hard, heavy pit within,
Yet all that I swallow,
Doesn't fill, doesn't ****
Doesn't keep the feelings in.
.
But still I eat.
Frenzied, fast: a furtive game,
Mad dash, a clock to beat.
To shove it down---dark and deep.
All the guilt and all of the shame.
.
'Til at last, how it aches
Bloated, bleary.  A greasy feast.
A carnage of boxes of candy and cakes.
But the void has been silenced.
Numb now, this sleeping beast.