Anticipating death with each day’s dawn,
a man lived decades on nothing but hope.
The muscles of his face collapsed like a dumpling,
all dimples and wrinkled eyes
and a halo of white hair lit from behind.
His heart, grown older with more in it to break.
He moved only by senseless gravity,
no longer susceptible to life’s suspense.
When God wants to punish,
he answers prayers with memories,
not always softened by the passing of time.
Some grow edges like knives down one’s spine.
There’s no use in admiring a thing ’cause it lasts.
Every turn in life’s road runs to memories past
that shift like chimeras of cold-shrouded code.
Surviving by grace of utility alone,
there was nothing left for his old bones but the grave.
Yesterday’s heroes fall, unraveled, like yarn dolls, unsaved.
