Servility to perpetual youth
Has fixed me to the plot I age on
The bitter tincture of neglect
Plays about my tongue and eases
Sighing music, down my throat
To blight the sediment
A record of my failures

Let malnourishment serve as your sustenance
Raise flares to the dwellings of equivocation
May impermanence temper your suffering
Your sibilant manifold questioning
And your pointed fear of a textbook senescence
Parceling out monotonies bent and arthritic
Waning baleful in the attics of decline

Shaped by the efforts of coercion
Bound helpless by the tethers of duress
Gilded with lack to frame your body
Dousing the kindling of the coming years

Near-forgotten
Our histories sprawling out behind us
Seconds birthing minutes became decades
Dusks new and unfamiliar sprang upon us
We hung our heads and pretended
There was never expectation
There was nothing to corrode

A flag in a sea of marble
A dream is an empty stomach
A flag in a sea of marble
A dream is a drowning child