Chalk Wishes.

Make the night lovable
Moon, and with your monocle
Looking down from so up there
Bless me one especial
And friends everywhere.

With a cloudless brightness
Surround our absences,
Shine, lest tonight any,
In the dark suddenly,
Wakes alone in a bed
To hear his own fury

Wishing his dark love, peat-covered,
Bombazine-stuffed and fraught with potmetal
Edges and flat zinc heart, dessicated, blown forth
Like the parasailed seeds of fieldweeds

Might wither and be so black
That it cannot be more than smutch glazing
The museum-quality petrification of the soul.

This absolves us of prayer; this
Radiates with the absence of need;
This will calm us;
Be cognizant of the silent tap
Of the ball-peen
Hammer on the Leatherette^® coverlet, the quilted
Marmoreal dance of Guilt, of
Fire, ash, lime, and dust
That comes free with everything.