To the Reader: If You Asked Me

I want you with me, and yet you are the end

of my privacy. Do you see how these rooms

have become public? How we glance to see if--

who? Who did you imagine?

Surely we're not here alone, you and I.

I've been wandering

where the cold tracks of language

collapse into cinders, unburnable trash.

Beyond that, all I can see is the remote cold

of meteors before their avalanches of farewell.

If you asked me what words

a voice like this one says in parting,

I'd say, I'm sweeping an empty factory

toward which I feel neither hostility nor nostalgia.

I'm just a broom, sweeping.

~ Chase Twichell

______________________________________________

Through joy and through sorrow, I wrote. Through hunger and through thirst, I wrote. Through good report and through ill report, I wrote. Through sunshine and through moonshine, I wrote. What I wrote it is unnecessary to say. ~ Edgar Allan Poe