Our dancing damages

I wander lonely as a clown,
setting idle float to words that vandalise
our claim to hindsight. As if only at the final
onslaught might I really see the crux, of
this. A human hothouse of all our godforsaken
damages – beside the landscape, beneath our sense
of trespass – cluster-fluttering bric-a-brac.

Continuous; our manifest starvation shines
and thrives, as if our lives were but mimes,
stretching in never-ending poetic lines devised
to meet the market needs of consumer bearings.
A throwaway glimpse. How we toss
headlines to the reassuring slight of darkness. 

Our utmost wealth dances beside us, but we outdo
even the speak of money. Words larger than our
own imaginations. Like global warming, extinction,
pollution of the very air we breathe. A poet couldn’t but
be gelatinous amidst such jocund competence. I gaze –
and gaze – but little think but think how wedded I am  

to the brink, and how often, when I countenance
the lies of my vacant or pensive morals (might that
better be morale) will they flash upon that inward
eyewitness which is the blockade of otherwise.
Yet still this supposed heaven fills with the plumage
of our fluttering; right here, our dancing damages.

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Self-isolation

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The Howe