Sonata With Some Furniture

Old hands with well-worn veins lit a cigar in 1948. It was a little cigar, kept in a box in a drawer of a dresser. Outside it was raining. Some time before, the hands were folded on the windowsill when they saw a dresser in the street. Some time after, the hands were holding, lifting, setting the dresser down by the open window. Then, that cigar, kept in a box in a drawer of the dresser. The hands reached, held, rolled it across the palm. Once to the lips and down again. Tossed around here and there, every finger got a touch. Now again to the lips and held between.

A long time before, the hands had been laughing at something funny and chanced to see a chair in the street. They lifted, took, set it down in the kitchen, but, the legs were uneven. Into the cabinet, snatch the matches, set them under the left forward leg. There, that's alright.

The hands, now, outstretched, found the chair and leg with matches underneath. Holding them in hand, the hands poised one finger at the matchbook-end and pushed: bright red everywhere as the other end slides out. The left reaches in. The right watches on.

Pressed to the surface, the long silence before, the match is struck.

Genealogy

to be perched high in wet clouds with
they behind, themselves the vessel

and I:

"Land!"

Liebesträume

A big round red belly
glowing hot like iron
moving up and down
and up and down in a
molten slumber, much
at love with the noise of
beginning, smiling warmly
a peaceful mouth with
resting feet propped
wine dropped within reach

the red dirt under.

Hunger moves the feet, (modest steps
for a modest treat ) - some
dusty fruit, but inside
warm and well, a clean
bite now and back to rest

our fine prey is fell.

The bright moon spills out
across an earthen floor and
we are illumined.

Man's Grandeur

White.

"Truce, truce!"

Grey.

"Truce?"

White.

"Never!"

Juvenal Delinquency

There was a time, just a few, heartrending generations ago, when the youth of the civilized world would chant, not without a touch of monastic nostalgia,

amō, amāre, amāvī, amātum -

and thereby dedicate themselves to a scholarly fraternity to whose agency we owe the very structure of our western minds.

No longer.

The past is overwhelmed by an implacable present, a march of the now with each step measured in new reward and quickly forgotten in turn.

Antiquity? Antiquated.

The generations of more recent vintage, insulated in their connectedness, have no memory for the past, contentedly occupied with courting their own adolescent sense of irony. Which begs the question:

when the past is utterly forgotten, root and branch, and watchmen of the new generation take up their charge in the world,

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?