as ever, through the pores of a leaking sieve,

a mortal shell slithers in its emptiness,

in the void of what is called the present,

death ably slings its arrows in sharp angles

directly into the marrow of ontology, at the

uncertain future, not at a distant past. the

faint outlines of memories washed out

signal that the lifeless one did breathe once,

as a colony of interlaced vignettes,

introjected, buried deep into the liminal,

infernal, relentless, a chorus of furies,

but he cannot re-experience his

take of the narrative, he is devoid of his

own story, neither can he

use the gavel of re-telling to

alter what has transpired. a pitiable

actor in the amphitheater of farce,

abandoned, neglected, aphoristic

orphan his extinguished being becoming,

on a steelmetal cloudy firmament,

a carbon copy of unaltered past his

experience has devolved,

the remnants of melancholy appear as

a misbegotten truant who, during a

the violent storm of inner upheaval harkens to

a faint apparition, volcanic eruptions that

used to huddle along in heat and steam

with what is passing as life, they used to follow

the curving arc of time, the bends

of inconsistent logic, the cliffs of invisibility,

they had the choice to recast at will the

done deed, the prescribed precedent,

the meaning of the past, but now—as the

forsaken, defeated shadow that he is—he

meanders in the corridors of remembrance,

carrying the fulcrum of times forgotten, but he

is not a participant anymore.

a violent volcano of spiraling molten

rock spewing through the heated synapses,

like a stray, unregulated

memory, his life has been surrendered to others,

the guardrails of the safety net of

the edited narrative told by our own myth,

subsumed into the sarcophagus of oblivion,

and his future is uprooted inexorably.

in the upended tunnel exit, where

light is fused with the coattails of forgetfulness,

every man that has no future, that is,

the inhabitants of the land of the unlived,

every inexistent soul person, is a

frozen figment of a hypothalamus, a

statute decapitated, becomes

the footnote to the annals of legend,

a storyline unsteadily hanging from

the lips of others, a pretext for

mischief and missed signals, buried

hatchets and unspooled tales,

endless statements and miscues.

down by meadows unfolding restlessly

there is the unburied history

marker, the milestone overpowered by over-

growth that marked his existence which

the core of heart and eyes, bloodstained mark

is bequeathed as a whole, undividable, to

a homesickness that is deeper than

the random survivors. the

middle-earth of despair, over the

emaciated body can be

flattened into a bland taste

sealed into the tomb, but the deeds of

gentle curving of time wasted,

the mortal cloud hanging dark over

experiential time that cannot be fenced in.