things which I build
all day, I tend no longer
to care about protecting, when the hard
wrecking ball of
evening comes. But each of the ruinous
things that I manage
to conjure every night to bomb
and incinerate and
obliterate the structures, I also know
will themselves collapse
into odd piles of rubble
again—to be cooled and
washed clean
away, by the blue ebbing
tide—of every perfectly
clear tomorrow
morning. And invariably, there'll be
no purpose or justice
or function, in any of the
messes I'm left
with, but there will be plenty
of the coziest, most
spacious and marketable
roomfulls of mercy available—not
in surveying the extent
to which those things I've built
still exist, or
don't
any longer. But rather,
in negotiating—how?