Grief is a foreign empire

I huddle in fellow-man arms,
my neck unable to support my skull,
distant in an anonymous world
where my body's like a beast
in the slaughterhouse without grace,
a soulless creature
in endless longing;

everything familiar and customary
undressed and torn,
suddenly and all at once,
and the cold does with me what it will

in the blinding chill of light