Ten half-smoked cigarettes
The quiet ecstasy of confused compounded images
And howling guilt of blood-stained thoughts echoing
Whispered words
Touching elusive Truth
Stumbling, drowning, whirling,
In flumes of abstracted rhetoric,
Finally meaningless.
A loathsome man
In a forgotten room
Sneering through a forgotten smile
Of listless greed––
An old and world-frustrated man.
Time tumbles over itself on the face of a clock
Spirals through blank and restless eternities
Twists back upon itself
Until
In one startled instant,
Alone amidst the past half million,
The evening dies with the empty thud of a closing book.