City Falls

 

City falls

 

What right do you have to whisper lamentations to me

Your charity has only been that sifted bit of time leftover

Emailed, encrypted or late when the moon drifts sad in the sky

Look out at these building with their square quilted lights

Inside there are conversations building and breaking lives apart

tomorrow it will happen all over again

you will pull a page from the desk calendar and send it

drifting to a recycle bin

but you will have become another day older

and the neon will begin to glow as the traffic heads

to whatever box is called home

I hear the phone ringing and think

Its just the tender sound of empires crumbling

It will mean only what the historians write about

When we have been long buried

So what difference would my words make now when

Encumbered by such memories

I shift my own mortal coil around my shoulders

Adjusting its snakelike parameters until there is just enough space

To breathe, but

My heart beat seems a stranger these days

Peeking around the corner

Hiding and then suddenly popping up, fingers in ears, tongue sticking out

I’d like to smack it down but instead

I find it a pillow to nap its weariness against

In the mirror the face smiles back experimentally

Is this going to work?

She hums

And says nothing much

Composing lists of things to do

Penciling in the quality time while

Waiting for the next breakdown