Why

Strange Music

Men have seen their own graves at the edge
of clinic beds, afraid
the watches strapped to their wrists are nothing
       more than faces on clocks
still ticking in a childhood house.  To kneel
before a dying lover
is to know those calendars yellowing
         against a wall.  Sometimes
men stop eating. Just like that. No taste
to revive their tongues again.
Bells linger in the air long after
        pigeons fly up into
the afternoon, yet nothing endures
longer in the mind
than that echo of what we might have been.

(Timothy Liu)