"Before our lives divide for ever,
While time is with us and hands are free.“
-Algernon Charles Swinburne


There is a strangeness in the air today.
New buds came out on the branch,
green and purple and yellow,
like bruises on old arms.

The sun is gnarled, wrinkled,
folded between ****** clouds
like stringy dough in the knuckles.
The sun doesn't care, it doesn't care

if I'm alive or dead.
It sits in its eight minute perch
in perpetual mockery
of my careful observations.

Someday my dead ash will mock
the fat red belt-bloat of the sun ,
expanded to eat the first couple planets,
maybe even ours.

But no one cares.
If there was ever a lazy, wanton god
who made all this waste,
he or she retreated long ago

to watch these jests from afar.
If there was ever a devil who scourged
the hells with a red hand,
he or she retreated long ago.

Now there are just free hands,
roaming in the salted night
of the inner city boundary.
Free hands can touch what they want.

We are all frozen in time
by our unregenerate desires.
We are free-handed, starry-haired.
We are just lines, wavering.