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https://poets.org/glossary/persona-poem

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And there it is …

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You could surmise, if not summarize

His entire dilemma, by plainly describing

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This:

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I

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A room, decorative and ornate,

That nobody sits in … with two

Deliberately stationed chairs,

Two deliberately placed pillows,

Set-china, silverware, kettles and tea-cozies,

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All elaborately assembled

In an elaborately assembled room

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That no one uses, because no one needs to.

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A space that occupies a vacuum,

That deadens the air with silence

And suctions the life with its volume.

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II

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He paces that space,

Circles it.

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It was him that set the silverware,

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Him that placed the pillows

And him who laid the table.

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And the overbearing temptation, he suffers by,

To sit at it - to be drawn into its cyanide laced

And arsenic-adulterated orbit -

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Is paled

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By the knowledge that there is no one there, to sit beside,

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No one there, to share

In the passage of finite grains

Through the oblong-concave frame

Of an hourglass, of stray sand and fiber

Unrelentingly marking

The unrelenting passage 

Of time, against the incessant counting of time's keeper.

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And no one beside himself

To stand there, and bare witness 

To the table’s realized existence

Or to the table's fabled origin -

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Modestly constructed - to begin with.

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III

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And this …

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This image, this crippling loneliness

And compellingly complete sadness

Would be, for most human beings,

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Absolutely pitiable;

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It would warrant pity,

Guarantee pity.

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If it were only for not

That I, as the describer, having already pre-determined

That pity

Was exactly the kind of thing, that describing it

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Would naturally elicit,

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Had set the whole stage - rendered the image -

Hoping that pity might be something

Somebody willing to sit at that table, beside me,

Might yet somehow be 

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Willing, to exchange for it.

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