The mahogany Night
ends with its last drag
on its cigarette,
and out of the smoke
the potent form of daylight
takes its first breath.

There was a vision
during the time when moonlight
lounged there on my couch,
a vision as straight at its
invokation as a splinter
coming off a cloud falls.

But now as I remember
it seems as crooked as
a pyre - jumbled and
not worth a two-pence
to any but the body
it suspends.

And so I must forget this
phantasm as I return to
what I will refer here as
the House of Usher.

I do not know what to
feel of her beside me,
a cloister of denial who
fights so brutally with
plastic alchemy the one
thing she cannot change.

And off to start my day
I go, in sequence like a dotted
line to sell my precious time
on Earth to a greedy tinman
(and this one doesn't care
to quest to find his heart).

When did it all just turn to
milk? Man wasn't meant to
breathe this way; and as I drive
in my car I start to
dwell on the world that got away
when Night blew her last smoke.