Red-barked eyes
reflect a broke down sign
announcing no vacancy,
your last nerve splayed like a long lost
glove tacked to a fence post, edges brittle,
a trickle of something singed
invading your nostrils. Voices,
not your own, crawl the air,
mimic a dying breeze, sip thin breaths,
your youth fading like tarnished sumac
along a face of listless hillock,
one by one words leave you.
Daylight dies in fitful fragments—
a tone of sky, a foreboding of pines,
wind full of branches, leaving
no holes in the blackness.
