Come decadent widows, mourning and
Berating your breasts in insipid speech.
“Hold,” they cry,
“For dead and rotting go our loved-ones
And now they are ill-prepared.”

Fictional mourners! In creating you,
I force upon you some relation.
I make your black parade one of pity
And I see Sicilian hair-lipped goddesses
Weeping through their new-found chastity.

But it is farce. And they are farce
And the sculpted piety they bear on
Hardened brows is
A fiction. It bears no resemblance to the tedium
And the sick, exhaustive drudgery
Of excessive cutlery for
A silent dinner.
Or a lumpy set of night clothes that
No one is meant to see.