V. an erstwhile conclusion

years from now the ants still won't be able
to tell their story and the men will lie
dead under the dusty highways while the
girls who used to escape to watch them love
each other will sit at home swelling with
new life (it will be spring then, always spring),
mourning for youth lost to the summer,

and nothing will be the same even though the
world fails to tilt even one degree off its
axis -

the old ones will still be old and the young ones eternally young;
the winters still full of unrecognized loves and
the summers still overstuffed with old bedsheets tied into hasty knots,
but the years cannot be reenacted, they must be
told as bedtime stories, urgings for the next
century's princesses and would-be heroes.

the book can never be closed at the right spot -
we must all keep on reading.