skirting the rusty rose of a brooch dangling on canvas bodice as she leans tightly over me; the waves of wrinkles on her be-bangled red hands pointing to the wrong punctuation; this is dream-building in the fifth grade; don't end the dream too soon, she gruffs sing-song like a prize-winning racoon; and still applauds the bricklaying we so clumsily feign for our castles in the sky; tho she, too, dies of cancer in the last year; the tubes at the very last weaving through the canvas; something of a final stitch to the making of a dream; and so i think all dreams in me they die in darkness and still i wonder what happens to the crenellated castle walls i abandoned scores of years and many As ago; and still we pat our doeeyes on their infinitile heads and **** our cynical shacks-by-the-forest-fires back into our heads, begging beneath the damp light of early-onset reverie: save us, won't you, from the stiff stillborn of dreams our generation lost to the fantasy of getting what the saddest, dreamless dollared dupes decree; oh be better yet for me, my naive sums, and take your brick-laying; your canvas sheen; your impossible, doubtless dreams with broach and gnarl; with gruff and soundless trill; your soulful self metastasizedΒ Β with every beat to the happy grave.