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