Poetry | A So-Nettled Nothing

And there will be a mobility within time but not perspective,

where the whole of it will flow like pethidine into our selves.

It will knock the books from shelves, and the boots shall rumble hell, and no one will notice.

It will burn the hands of those at the rubber factory, and not a one will note this.

There will be none who wrote this. And a man of ragged

clothing, tired eyes fired with the fear of a pestilence

that is not smelt on flaky, rotting skin, nor in the streets sewered with shit,

will find a box, a lovely little box that is to be stood upon,

and he will stand on and understand the dawn of a streetcorner

that is not listening to his kind any longer. But understand she will not,

the child who drowns in a scarlet shawl, bones all, that his words are vacuous,

and laconic incessantly, and hideous to me.

Lo, there will be no one to move up nor down this fear—an abacus

slid too much to the side which is near—of nothing.