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.