In the long run, we are all dead.
—John Maynard Keynes
Gray pelt of mouse limp in injury
beneath the kitchen’s leaking ceiling,
gray subtraction. I crouch in a cramped
room displacing my mind, trying to put it
for an instant into your body.
The bait was irony working again,
you can taste the bitter end.
Perhaps you somehow know
there’s nothing to be afraid of:
the irony of nothing, taking
so much of our attention,
power of the vacuum
ripping us again and again
out of our upholstered moment.