I notice
lack of faces
'round town,

obvious ones,
that my eyes seek in vain,
and others,
even if not immediately marking
their absence
with that sense of breathlessness,
still,
by not maintaining their space
upon that wall of presence,
hollow out
the atmosphere
of this showroom of faces,
in an ever so gradual faintisizing
of my hometown,
layer upon layer
of myself,
faded,
rearranged,
erased,
hidden
in the preserved light
of tilting letters
in boxes of diaries,
carried through the ages
by grace or chance,
my eyes burning
with fiery words
rising out of oblivion,
the human pattern
on the gallery walls
of the present
breathing new voices
'round my trajectory

and when, once in a while,
a familiar face
appears
out of the strangeness
of apparition,
it, too, has changed
into a caricature
of aging;
wrinkles of face,
stooping of posture,
speech full of rear-views
and a body oozing
with the characteristic stench
of sweaty longjohns,
straight out of that pre-crematory
degeneration,

while the sun glimmers and glitters
in the eyes
of freshly sprouting kids,
whose high pitches fly
like reflections
between the windows
of the backyard
walls
of others' Sunday tombs,

the outskirts wheezing
with the foam of sinking souls