Everything around me is still

and waiting,

has patience,

knows not to reveal itself

except as stillness;

the books on the bookshelves,

the shelves themselves,

and the pictures, paintings, phonograms

in their CD & LP cases,

and drawers that haven’t moved in years,

furniture that has found the perfect refuge

right on the edge of eternity;

matter’s adherence to its visible forms

in the spaces of Euclidean geometry;

the tireless extension

- and I as the observatory of dark energy

and a death squad on its way from too late to too late;

everything that should have been different,

but was lost in vain;

the old time’s lock for what has passed,

which is stuck in the musty room of imperfect tenses;

immutable evidence

of what shouldn’t have happened,

or absolutely should have happened,

in what only the guilty himself can forgive,

which is harder than hard,

for it is easier to crouch in one's autoimmune accusation,

with one's unforgivenesses cast in specially hardened steel,

buried deep in the past