Could from this usefull work his cares release.

 

🪦

 

The wind is a wild wolf but be still my lovely.

 

🪦

 

Who enjoyed the grass no differently.

 

🪦

 

Feeling has departed

 

🪦

 

Beautiful, yes, but not much company.

 

🪦

 

nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:

 

🪦

 

no longer wearing / rainbows or rain,

 

🪦

 

how willing the stars are to greet unstarredness

 

🪦

 

fell flat unfelt but feeling still

 

🪦

 

From a black mesh of wires in the sky.

 

🪦

 

Serrate as elm, entire as love.

 

🪦

 

Not sick at fire, nor languishing with time.

 

🪦

 

The only parade I want is rain

 

🪦

 

Respectful moonlight inhabits them.

 

🪦

 

Emptied of its poetry.

 

🪦

 

I do lie down here, meek.

 

🪦

 

I am but a lump of clay, but I was placed beside a rose and caught its fragrance . . .

 

🪦

 

Think of it on a tombstone: “He cheered up a lonely unhappy poet with two charming girls and a bag of bananas.”

 

🪦

 

Where sentences are finished,

 

🪦

 

Hadouken!

 

🪦

 

Known for life-taking accidents

 

 

 

*“Possible Epitaphs” is a cento that borrows lines from poems that I think would be good on a gravestone. Thanks to the sources of these lines, who are, in order: William Davenant, Stephen Watts, Michael Earl Craig, Louise Glück, Elizabeth Bishop (x3), Dennison Ty Schultz, Derek Gromadzki, Bishop again, Rosamund Stanhope, Davenant again, Elio Ianni, Barbara Guest, W. H. Auden, John Berryman, a source I don’t know quoted in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, James Wright, Ianni again, and two readers from the February 2026 Night Light poetry reading.