Elegy for the Newborn
Howie Good

Sure, you've reason to weep. Who hasn't? From somewhere there's loud and incoherent hammering, a solar system being built from cannibalized parts.
Everything simple has become complex. The librarian doesn't care as she once might have that the books I'm returning are missing some words. A yellow cab, its engine running, is always waiting at the curb for a messiah to appear.
It's the difference between a democracy and a republic, dark, mossy clouds like morbid thoughts not even drugs can dispel. And though there's no wind, the puddles shiver.
My face has come to resemble the faces I've met in elevators and vestibules. I should've known it would, and that I'd be admitted, before heartbreak had vaporized, to the priesthood of grief.
The air is burning; the clock, unreliable. I stop to rest with the newborn on the border of shrill gulls.

1996 © 2008