Modern Romanticism

Hear this,
knowing what’s left
of a sad man
with his beating heart,
racing for apocalyptic fits
of senseless rediscovery.

He wants to see,
he wants to cry
shapes of what he’s lost,
holding hands with someone
in the mist.

Another pointless resupply
to that heart that lives on
in ceaseless moments,
though not without momentum,
not without that push
towards a bottomless hole,
where reflections fail
to look back.

He looks back
over his shoulder
to see what coffin lids
might hide.
He signals for his own retreat
to those cold quarters
within his vacant mind,
blank with the snow
that has smothered his warmth
into yesterday.

What a life, what blood
going on, tugged from a rope,
within that urge
to see summer’s surrender
to a truthful winter.
To his own, doing this
without reprieve
for what he cannot leave
tucked with quilts made of ash,
in the seedless earth.