For all their bark, the straw dogs bite as well:
taste    touch    sight    sound    smell

The years, the miles out and back are run through us
      as we sit here.

That future life, slept in the anemic sunlight
While the old poison slowly filled my whole
      bloodstream.

In the palace, at the table set for the feast, they were
      awaited

More and more creased each year, worn paper thin,
and still it longs for them all.

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

Wordless graffiti of unease
when people die where do they go?

And all the while we were ourselves ideas,
not new ones, either, of if not a mind

We’ve loved other bodies the years have altered:
knuckles swollen, skin slackened, eyelids grainy

Their street is being frosted to a myth.