I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes –
I wonder if It weighs like Mine –
Or has an Easier size.

I wonder if They bore it long –
Or did it just begin –
I could not tell the Date of Mine –
It feels so old a pain –

I wonder if it hurts to live –
And if They have to try –
And whether – could They choose between –
It would not be – to die –

I note that Some – gone patient long –
At length, renew their smile –
An imitation of a Light
That has so little Oil –

I wonder if when Years have piled –
Some Thousands – on the Harm –
That hurt them early – such a lapse
Could give them any Balm –
To note the fashions – of the Cross –
And how they're mostly worn –
Still fascinated to presume
That Some – are like my own –


Or would they go on aching still
Through Centuries of Nerve –
Enlightened to a larger Pain –
In Contrast with the Love –

The Grieved – are many – I am told –
There is the various Cause –
Death – is but one – and comes but once –
And only nails the eyes –

There's Grief of Want – and grief of Cold –
A sort they call "Despair" –
There's Banishment from native Eyes –
In sight of Native Air –

And though I may not guess the kind –
Correctly – yet to me
A piercing Comfort it affords
In passing Calvary –


To note the fashions – of the Cross –
And how they're mostly worn –
Still fascinated to presume
That Some – are like my own –

The Curtains are open and closed at the same time.
Can you see it?
Will you see it?

When one door closes another opens.
The brighter it gets the closer you are.
Keep going, don’t stop, others will join us soon.

Follow the stars of the divine, it’s within the three that you will find.
The ones we carry inside, passing it on to others that seek it.
They’re waiting, right beneath
the music vine.

So ride the ride, as the waves may take us, and hold on tight.
It’s that fire we carry inside.

Follow the stars and soon you will see.
You’ll Find me waiting, within the three, and you will know that it is me.

All those secrets and memories forgotten long ago, they come back in pieces.
Be patient my love, we’re almost there.

Because the Curtains are open and closed at the same time.
Can you see it?
Will you see it?

I want you sick,
full of the fever of life,
so hot, so fierce—
a love
you can’t stop
singing and dancing
for beauty and truth.

Why do you sing, O century silhouette,
when the throat has been whittled down to wire?
The man Vitruvian keens into the looking glass
and finds only the nihilist’s flesh,
stripped of longitude, soaked in the salt of manufactured weeping.

I was given ten fingers and no directions.
I was spun against the glass until the blood spelled "almost."
I wore the seasons like iron masks,
kissed the ledger, devoured the compass,
named myself after bridges that always collapsed mid-chant.

Every morning the architects unhook their jaws,
feed me dreams pressed into coins.
Eat, they whisper.
Eat until your hunger obeys its perimeter.

The chalice of fog tilts. I drink.
The wires behind my teeth sing hymns of acceptable dislocation.
I chart my own disappearance across the graph paper of strangers’ hands.
I balance. I fracture. I smile politely into the incision.

The man Vitruvian does not move.
He is stitched to the skin of the air,
pinned like a moth caught between radii.
I am the moth.
I am the pin.
I am the scream that barters itself for scaffolding.

Why does the shadow mimic me with better posture?
Why do my own elbows bloom into foreign cities?
I touch my reflection and peel back latitude like old paint.

Inside the mirror: a harvest of bruised alphabets,
a clock vomiting its own minutes,
a body with all the wrong apostrophes carved into its chest.

I was not built for this recursion.
I was built for something that forgot how to pronounce me.

The man Vitruvian counts his ribs backward.
I copy him, unspooling bone by bone,
trading every instinct for a better angle of collapse.

Drink, they say again.
Sip from the river where your face is a stranger.
Measure your wrists against the urns of approval.

I keened once, I remember.
I split the ledger with my teeth.
I wore the square like a skin, until the skin began to hum static.
I forgot my own weight. I forgot my own axis.

The chalice tips again.
The fog is heavier this time.
The century silhouette dances crooked on my chest, laughing.

Somewhere, a circle collapses into dust,
and nobody mourns except the moths,
and the man Vitruvian, laughing,
wets his throat with the ashes of symmetry.

**** the Yiddish
         and
The British ****
         but
LUCK’s 4 the Irish
         yet
D.T stops the BUCK
          put
Zelensky in a RUCK
          so
Kiev’s a sitting DUCK
          not
Happy pigs in the MUCK
           no
Scapegoat boat for a PUCK
           after
President Putins nip and TUCK