seasons (a poem)

(Image- A Day in the Life by MorrisoN)

dead things move among us…
but we do not know it.

we meet them
ruffling through parking lots and shopping malls,
shuffling in shrouded retrograde,
their heads held low
against the palls of life
and loss
and mummifying winds

and us

their cloudy faces turning toward the sun of our “hellos,”
excavating for us hollow smiles
from the stormy spaces
behind their scarab eyes…

and on our train rides home,
day blueing fast, night slowly rolling in,
suburbia rumbling into view in grainy blurs,
they lift their cur-eared mysteries
concealing their elusive histories
behind the rocking, reeling ciphers...
their faces stony sepulchers, their mocking, toothy, caverns
spitting echoing refrains of “ooh” and “ahh”
and “hahaha… haha”
trying to hide their ancient inner embers’
fading out…

until before you know
the blue has deepened down to dark
and they arise to disembark…
whispering their “goodbye's" around averted faces
as they go,
their eyes intent to find their homey spaces,
where they shall hover o’er their comfy chairs,
and chew their tasteless sustenance,
and sip their quenchless beverages,
and peer into their depths, searching for
the inks of ages
written in the hieroglyphic night
upon what is left of the hell-bent moths,
crashing against
the ankh
of the bare porch light…

searching, blindly, through their dusty throes,
straining their minds to remember those
wondrous days,
when they were new…
just wide-eyed kids…
giggling in the shadows

of the pyramids.