than some artistic
license, it's
always the young
who are zealous
and wanton
and so frantic
to stoop down and
scrape away the letters—
not to mention
reshuffle, tweak, and
goose the hallowed numbers—
which are written
even now, in the eye
of the mind,
on the definite surface
of some melancholy stone.
It's not that they don't know
the chaos
that awaits them;
it's just that their default
is to fill the world
with noise;
to keep the story going;
to modulate thin air;
to keep the all-night
party raging
on both sides
of that innocuous,
horizontal dash
which is so
claustrophobically
sandwiched by the finite,
but which seems
to bloom
without its referents
and, itself, wants
only silence.
