Should I say that you’re dead?
You touched so brief a fragment
Of time. There’s much that’s sad in
The joke God played
I scarcely comprehend
The words “you’ve lived”; the date of
Your birth and when you faded
In my cupped hand
Are one, and not two dates
Thus calculated
Your term is, simply stated
Less than a day
Who was the jeweler
Who from our world extracted
Your miniature –
A world where madness brings
Us low, and lower
Where we are things, while you are
The thought of things?
Should I say that, somehow
You lack all being?
What, then, are my hands feeling
That’s so like you?
Such colors can’t be drown
From nonexistence
Tell me, at whose insistence
Were yours laid on?
There are, on your small wings
Black spots and splashes –
Like eyes, birds, girls, eyelashes
But of what things
Are you the airy norm?
What bits of faces
What broken times?
What places shine
Through your form?
As for your nature mortes;
Yet you’re akin
To nothingness –
Like it, you’re wholly empty
And if, in your life’s venture
No-thing takes flesh
That flesh will die
Yet while you live you offer
A frail and shifting buffer
Dividing it from me