As the smell of silence drifts Like coffee in a room of talk, Seated in the ranks of strangers, (To him, and perhaps also to themselves) A man pauses from a book Of poems, and writes:

Pain’s arrow doesn’t go through time. It merely freezes, a icicle hanging Off of memory’s fountain, over The copper of pennies thrown in for luck, Each occasion erased in the slab of ice,

And waits, clear and hard, to thaw Deep inside the worm-rich humus of Everafters and evermores.