the fool in love, or the fool
who pines for it?*

have I not sat at the King's table,
for decades of eons, eons of millennia,
the mealy taste of the poverty of loneliness,
made the sweetbitter
and the meaningless
blander still
full surrendering to slow starvation of my
humanity

denied the rise and set,
the watch and the calendar,
the sundial inoperable,
masters of none,
there are distinguishing marks
upon this victim,
who no longer recalls refusing
love

just another dusty bust
of a man tough as
plaster

the mask of
going it alone
so well adhering
no longer masked
but his first skin

unlike him,
love poems
waterfall self-destructing,
suicide by self-erosion
and thereby
an everlasting guarantee
the answer be
he
who pines
and dies a little bit
daily