Your wart,
When it went-

How I missed
Kissing

Your little
Blemish

A grotesquerie of time
Sculpted faces
Litter the landscape.

Classical columns stand
Jagged and broken or lie
Forlorn.

A soft oriental anxiety
Hangs in clouds over yhe scene,

And all the waves of
History fall.

The shift proceeds-
A drunken monk
Misdeliberates his
Kung Fu.

All is change
All balance is wobble-
The sun sets-uncaring

I am neither this nor that,
Neither here or there.
I do not talk too fast nor
loud.

My ego rides on me like
a rug. It needs vacuuming.
Today was a pretty dusty
day with lists and conversation

written with the accouterments
of my old age.
I am a fantasist.
It shows in my mistaken
choice of you.

You cannot hear me.  I am too loud.

Whatever I have to say is not
a flower or a song.

I am the avatar of she who
left.  The husk of intelligence.

If there are questions that
are unanswered  ask another.
I have the memory of a
conversation, an admonishment,
a loving reminder from someone
who was wrong.

And the reclining apneic
experience to

sleep. To say

my

prayers to the God of my
understanding


Caroline Shank
4.17.2024

I always choose the losing side

They wear the prettiest silk
Woven clothes
And die

In droves

~
It feels like the anesthetic is wearing off

This circus of machines

From coin-operated hostility

To wholesale apathy refineries

They tell us it's winter down in the subdermal

They tell us the foundation has grown weak

Dislocation is a incoming storm

Mirrors are distorted screens

Placeholders really

In a city without children

Even the statues weep

Snow upon the ground that was once blood

Now an empire without heirs

Even the trees hate us
~