How can a hollow ache?
Or a poet write?
When the part that felt is cut away
Excised with a razor of reason
Bandaged with the dressings of the Sensible
To be healed, so it is said, with time
Yet like the morbid curiosity of the child who picks at the scab
Or perhaps more akin; the itch of an amputee's phantom limb
There is still an ache
How can that be so?
How can a hollow ache?
Or, come to that,
A poet write?