Once upon abysmal time,
A dismal time I should dare say,
There lived a miser man, the wiser
To the woeful ways of man.

He lived in pallid peace and torment,
Abhorrent in his solemn sight,
For he could see forever - the better
To know the woeful ways of man.

The world's collapsed inside his head,
Transpired into some sepulchre.
Ragnarok had come and run
To purge the woeful ways of man.

Corruption was a fever dream,
Demeanour only ghosts aloft.
Extinction came without distinction
To end the woeful ways of man.

There was but one survivor left,
The wiser to his dying ways.
He saw the placid land, made tacet
By the woeful ways of man.

Nothing left to spoil the view,
The toils so wrought were gone at last.
The man laid down and died: Goodbye,
O woeful ways of man.

Once the woods turned grey there was no going back.
He watched it happen with disbelief clouded in his eyes
as the trees turned ashen and age crumbled up their trunks.
The leaves at the very top were the last to go
They held out like a prayer
seeming to stretch a little taller, cry a little louder
but soon they paled
succumbed to the frost that claimed their brothers
The soil too had turned to dust
He knelt and tried to hold some in his hand,
but there was nothing left to hold.
His empty fingers cupped his empty ears
as he realized a silence
he had never heard before,
that no one had ever heard
before the woods turned grey.
He ceased to notice time
when the wind could no longer move
and the branches lay still as ghosts
The whisperings of life that marked each hour
were now forever tacet
and without them
he could not know how long he knelt
huddled in the ancient dust
of the woods turned grey.
He stayed there,
contained in the color of his last breath
Those greens and browns and blues
He had breathed into himself just a moment ago,
just a second
Before the woods turned grey
He stayed there
until the ash covered up his feet.
It followed the creases of his fingers
and crept up the lines above his clouded eyes
It took all the time in eternity
but that isn’t very long at all
And when it reached that last breath
the living air he held so close
it gently, tenderly, lovingly
helped him crumble
into the woods turned grey.

On a wood slat bench near City Park Lake,
I blew dusk into darkness on clouds of an exhausted Cohiba.
Dry, starless, midwestern summer shadows
sound like one-handed applause wrapped
in padded outrage. A rogue drake stirs unseen behind
nearly visible bushes at the water’s edge.
The rest of the tacet brood turn
condescending beaks at his faux pas.

It is the silence of trespassing,
disregarding closing time,
defying petty ordinance
to the tune of two frogs and windsong.
The empty side of my lips
curl in half a smile.
The appall in a proper rent-a-cop
would be irreverently rewarding.

Life doesn’t get any better than this…
At least it feels so now in the dizzy,
near fainting, larger-than-normal ****
on a larger-than-normal cigar. Regardless,
it’s a fine moment in time.