It’s a cold night, ripe with leaf scent, stars shuffling like cards,

The moon peers down—the king of hearts, with beady, knowing eyes.

Lately I have felt them, the last embers of something I have forgotten,

Warming my brittle heart, my hands

That once attempted, albeit wrongly,

To piece the broken bits of world together.

Stars slide across the sky like playing cards. I spy on the woman next door

As she clips her roses back to the quick. A stunning murder.

Why bother with the dying, loyal to their wounds,

Their television programs, their firelight, a simulacrum?

I insist that the emperor get dressed. I am told I am a fool.

I have been dealt a bad hand. I take myself shopping,

Buoyed by the mission to buy meaning, magazines,

Order handbags online, organize my way around the chaos—

Rising oceans, pornography, Trump,

The fat injected lips of the elite. Anger

Like a pot of geraniums, sits heavy and dumb

On the window ledge, aches upwards towards the streetlight. Demands clipping.

As if the stars don’t mind this, the stupid lust for forgetting,

The drawn-on beauty where there is none. They shine, already gone.

I have been tricked into a corner. Who drew these new parameters?

The moon of my lost illusions shines brighter because of them.