This feeling was made
like wax cake for a diner dessert carousel.
It is a spinning head on a lathe of plastic wrapping:
packaged, polished, perfectly premade, but

the air is temporary,
thick with embers of remembering-when's, dimming downward
into perfumed dust, lifting again with sucked-in sighs
below half-closed eyes, for once meeting, and agreeing.

These words were meant to sooth;
a quieting hand on a cat's last breath.
Focused formalities instead glaze the eyes, where behind
a voice babbles excuses.

This gut churns and knots,
already starving itself.

These hands are trepid, but below the table,
clutching firmly a ring they always meant to keep.

08/10/2007

Posted on 08/10/2007
Copyright © 2022 Matthew Zangen