What is happiness worth

to one who sees

the subtle derision in every smile?

Stolen moments

dulled by an artificial glow.

What a brilliant play life dreams,

this burden of being can be satiated

through flaccid epiphanies

But here you are deceived-

stoically plucking photons from the sunset

over Athens’ warm electric nights.

All for which we reduce

ourselves;

writhing

forms-

hungry mouths

meeting in a venomous exchange of lust

I fathered the dawn.

Rising from the cold embers of dusk

and where it set again into the reverberations

of our memory fading into the rhythm of a child tracing contours in your ear.

—-Jonathan Renfield