I notice

lack of faces

'round town,

obvious ones,

that my eyes seek in vain,

and others,

even if not immediately marking

their absence

with that sense of breathlessness,

still,

by not maintaining their space

upon that wall of presence,

hollow out

the atmosphere

of this showroom of faces,

in an ever so gradual faintisizing

of my hometown,

layer upon layer

of myself,

faded,

rearranged,

erased,

hidden

in the preserved light

of tilting letters

in boxes of diaries,

carried through the ages

by grace or chance,

my eyes burning

with fiery words

rising out of oblivion,

the human pattern

on the gallery walls

of the present

breathing new voices

'round my trajectory

and when, once in a while,

a familiar face

appears

out of the strangeness

of apparition,

it, too, has changed

into a caricature

of aging;

wrinkles of face,

stooping of posture,

speech full of rear-views

and a body oozing

with the characteristic stench

of sweaty longjohns,

straight out of that pre-crematory

degeneration,

while the sun glimmers and glitters

in the eyes

of freshly sprouting kids,

whose high pitches fly

like reflections

between the windows

of the backyard

walls

of others' Sunday tombs,

the outskirts wheezing

with the foam of sinking souls