Tiny, dark, annoying, air-scribbling, vaguely
Malicious things keep buzzing around him like
Electrons about a nucleus, interstellar debris

Their flesh drifting off like ... like loose hay in strong wind.

They took the host into their mouths,
Held it on their tongues, and washed it

He begins to notice how all his single friends have dogs
And wear expensive running shoes, how their conversations run
To deep metaphysical questions that didn’t exist before 1983.

One day he steps out for a pack of smokes
And comes back to find his family has deserted him.
The wife with the end curled hair, the boy and the girl

Just after Ludwig II's death the surgeons opened
   below his ribs and removed his heart:
it's now preserved, indeed enshrined, in a silver vase

We could have finished had he kept his mind
to this, a solitary gem, its mount 
near Oberammergau, the home of wood-