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Night has come. Lock the doors tight, shutter the windows, and turn on the lights. The rain is falling. The arms that once would hold you are folded tight, the eyes that poured into yours no longer look your way. Write your name inside the book sleeve, pretend that things are yours, that this belonging might catch on. Sit there and stare off through the wall. Even sleep won’t return your calls.

Oh fragile heart, oh merciless night! The weeping hasn’t ceased though your eyes are dry. The sad dumb world so much dumber and sadder, the lonesome honed to a hazard. The words spent with barely the press of intention clutter up your hands and mouth, the neuron map homunculus a cartoon hung with your flesh and senses, the horror show stillness as the doorknob slowly turns. The madness is there, the rain is falling. Your heart awaits extinction.

It’s the way we never learn. It’s the way we fail to compensate. Shouldering the pose, harboring the burden, weighed down by the body you forget is you. Lilies and sparrows and other hints and figments. Ten thousand years of lies and nonsense clogging up the culture, the monkey so high it seems all tail, banging drums and thumping bibles to fill the time. The long line of luck and misgivings leading all the way to this dead end. Us murder apes locked in our little boxes, a few perfect darlings, families, tribes, and creeds. Then the placeholder, then the dead end. Turning is slow small circles as the rain fills the night.