His Life

This man lives a very solitary and dismal life

HIS LIFE
February 14, 2009

Life goes on
unraveling itself
like cellophane off a roll,
taping itself
down to anything
that appears peculiar.
It colors itself grey—
pale, nearly transparent,
and stands at the vast,
all-encompassing window
for hours on end
and the minutes settle
like thin cement
over its corpulent figure,
staining it with an
over-cast hue,
and like a ghost
it moves a hand now,
a knee,
gives a nod, shifts
its weight. The air
breaks like plaster around
it, leaving the figure to
itself in a grey world,
a grey on grey,
like clouds, like rain, like
pavement, amalgamating
life with death. Now
with what was and
what will be, for, to it,
it’s all the same
and when it stops to taste
a meal, it sits, back to wall,
spooning in pale heaps
of nondescript lunch
to a puppet mouth that
no longer has anything
to savor and when the
hour arrives and it’s
time to leave,
the earth grabs
at its ankles and promises
it won’t be long now
before grey of flesh
melts into the grey
of ash and earth
and tomorrow
will continue on forever.