No more blissful moons

No more blissful moons

Or bliss over a cadaver

Promoting a broken luster

A painless, uncomplaining, muted iridescence 



Illegible, inaudible confessions of a type of life

That became tired and deaf and illiterate

Before it forgot how to write or speak

Forth the froth of last days ever-pending



Lost jobs and gained jobs

Hopes and triumphs and perils over nothing

Or over little, or over so little

As to be almost nothing, nothing minus itself



Many millions and unnumbered lives

Lived beneath that blissful disc

Or died there in the anti-sun

Worried about means and ends and means more than ends



Many times many times more than ends

So many more times in fact

That the unwary moon was at a haunted time

Harnessed and exploited for just those timely ends



To pour its mineral salts

Onto the flattened plane of the leveled earth

While rockets and other unrusted automata

Beat the earth flatter still



Until the debris became too much and too thick

Whether from the moon or the earth is hard to say

And both bodies began coughing in fits

Chasing away every nourishing light



The last remaining cochlea in their caverns

Interpreted the sound of the spasm

As a dream of children lost in laughter

The utter sound of the moon's undying fading



As the end of a fine play

That we would have written ourselves

They joked to themselves, while all the while

Hearing nothing of it but eustachian collapse.