i.

It took the world to learn how alone I am
without you, to conquer every city’s
walls, to saunter over their ramparts and not
subdue their peoples, through my illusion’s peep-
hole this armour dissolved into peace pieces
of paper enthralled with portraits of us some
anonymous artist scrawled, portals with doors

heavier than uncivil twilight dropping
its atom bomb like a skipped stone thrown onto
heaven’s mirror below, showering with slow
meteors some lone Edenic town no one
since æons ago has ever visited
or written about, nor will again, The End
guided like a weapon loaded with gusto

down the missile silo of a nondescript
throat swallowing whole its bowl of dust before
dawn, upon drowning in a high tide of night’s
deafening sound I swam the treacherous breadth
of our second death’s Hellespont, lost, awash
in his vast ink memorializing for
all our fall from grace, lips ruddy with rumour

                    ii.

certain that with so delicate a pen in
such a heavy hand weighted with truth’s timbre,
our fate’s elusive author would never err
in depicting it as it was, nor for love
or money ever pity either’s loss and
entertain giving us both his name, owing
no one but time which destroys everything

its mystery’s key, bequeathing to lonely
history only a moment’s passing to
endure for eternity, men suffering
the lingering legacy of a minor
masterpiece, a bleak drawing by an unknown
master whose reputation for capturing
in the space of a bled hour its bitterest

honesty such that we still bleed whenever,
even apart, distanced ever since we posed
so questionably for the artist whose eye’s
alchemy immortalized my weakening
philosophy which blew apart the stone of
these hearts this picture answers with an aching
uncertainty aging us prematurely.