We’ll never speak again—he’ll be fine—
they always are, whether caught in this
lie boiling or high, mercurial
and low profile, cold as rainwater
folding older mettle’s rust into
terrible funerals for lost tears
misplaced trust in worse people trampled,
trouble blowing over as I call
it before Hell can Valhalla it
and claim him, banqueting to death on

                    his innocence, so the whole wide-eyed
unintelligent world smiles, seeing
this piece of shit writing of his own
failed marriage to chemicals and to
suffering, while incomplete strangers
witnessing stranger things hiss at this
illusion of a miracle thrice
condemned for selling them, a Simple
Simonist moving in like a wind
and out like a breath, passing through this

                    gasping emptiness quicker, even,
than weeping silver as I chance it,
a less-miserable existence,
perhaps, flowing through unsuspecting
men with suave, then swift, indifference
they experience when my petty,
little extravagance of wildest
hopelessness their blindest kindness and
most permissive patience wears thin, when
silence arrives, revealing to them

                    just how unjust, and ridiculous,
a poet’s expectations are, and
how impossible it has been for
others to love him—sulphur, salt, and
mercury, with all of their ancient
alchemy, unable to cure or
purify a soul of what ails it,
if it was born so miserable,
made, from Creation, to fill vessels
of timid creatures too numb to feel.