Faces in a Rear View

“The room is worn out; it is as if people have been coming here since the beginning of time.”

The middle of the room

Smelling of dust,

The pattern of an eye, repeats.

Bare walls like these

Have too much between them,

Too many heartbreaking corners

Made human, by virtue

Of being touched.

So the rubbed down knob

And the painted latch,

Moldings of men

Wear away, into slowness

Pass away like smoke.

*

From the hallway mirror

A face enters from a tomb

Finding itself,

Hanging from a peculiar hook,

Feels alone by the evening.

Night, (all consuming) falls

A habit of recession

Alike to each one before.

Yesterday is remembered.

*

“Now I can no longer see anything but the pallor of my face, with its deep eye-sockets, buried in the dusk, and my mouth full of silence which is gently but surely stifling and destroying me.”

For days to multiply:

The next imaginable face

Glanced from a dark window.

There is only one’s voice

Carouseled sounds

On a flat, languid tongue

Vaguely human.

The exaggerated sunset

Is a small knick of death

Is a captivity

Stripped and diminished

Wandering to a dangerous lust

For a return.