a dusty room
filled with sorrow
old interests now hallow

boxes all piled up
silent as an old tomb
the abandoned backroom

once golden shining rings
you can see the grimy buildup
on the items you tried to cover up

in the corner sits a broken violin
for the music that once flew on wings
that old case is full of wood and strings

Trees are allowed to grieve.

crumpled sorrow falls in vividness

painting the floor

in ruby red blood, rust orange sweat,

decay brown despair.

trees are allowed the luxury of death

reverting back into their core, their roots

escaping the brutal truths winter brings

hardened in the wind

confirmed in the frozen ground they have

rooted in.

festooned in the envious demons they surmounted

trees are allowed to bloom again

triumphant over their darker seasons.

without giving cause

without giving reason.

Perhaps this is the vitality of the forest

the humble and solitary

transformation found in death.

My thoughts are crabbed and sallow,
My tears like vinegar,
Or the bitter blinking yellow
Of an acetic star.

Tonight the caustic wind, love,
Gossips late and soon,
And I wear the wry-faced pucker of
The sour lemon moon.

While like an early summer plum,
Puny, green, and ****,
Droops upon its wizened stem
My lean, unripened heart.

The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
“The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.”
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can’t help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.