tearlessly, lovelessly, it corrodes, decaying to loose laggards of fingerpressed forearms and newly cut hair, adrift in memory’s cooled current, where longing looks darken and laughter distorts, fading through history’s retreat, relations becoming images, affects attenuating, never to be refreshed, never replenished, a gift to a rabble that wars with itself, all servants that are kings and kings that are servants, mouthing truths and lies, gospel and heresy, an uneasy murmur when thinking of her

<