Friday, February 21, 2025

THE DEAD

Some days, 
I'm afraid 

I no longer recognize 
their faces

with anything akin 
to familiarity 
or precision;

others, that I do—
and find them 
all too relevant 

from all of the wars 
I've seen on television.

*

Perhaps 
those feelings 
we expose

grow a tough skin 
of syntax, 

resistant to drought 
and strangulation, 

while those
we leave out 

starve and shrivel, 
having failed 
to sprout 

the well-muscled wings 
of articulation.

*

While we 
whiled away our lives 

feasting 
on prophylaxis, 

we were slowly 
but surely 

devoured 
by the analogous: 

as this corpse 
is to shrunken, 

so that one was 
to frivolous.