We thought we knew what loneliness was
Until our universes collapsed
into an impregnable bubble
When our borders contracted out of fear

Suddenly, we were trapped with people
Who we weren’t entirely at home with.
Time plus distance made the hearts grow fonder
But what happens when the space contracts

We worked to escape a lot of the time
Carved out niches reserved solely for ourselves
We bargained and maintained for a shred of self
We all hoarded little quarks and quirks.

Now, we all must turn inward.
Regulation, guideline, doctor-prescribed selfishness
We must spend time with each other
And embrace the decision’s made.
Summer’s almost over.
And a lonely winter isn’t far.

Siddhartha, my brother of a different mother,
Nirvana’s road is paved with your sole intention.
Your ideas are conceived to strike like lightning,
Flashes of fruition that force isolation.

Siddhartha, you locked me up in a far cloister.
A cell built to foster my love’s abstention.
To teach me detachment through holy internment
You bade me choose love or face annihilation

Siddhartha, what did Janapada do to you?
She was my royal wife and my heart’s true attention
You made me compare her to your hand picked devas.
Who’d make any mortal seem rather simian.

Siddhartha, I was better off as a donkey
Chewing sweet hay rather than enduring transcendence
You brought me salvation through forced isolation
And left me bereft of my souls’ occupation.

Her mouth touched him
like a whiskey’s kiss.
The cool brush of a ringing rim.
A moment’s anticipation
her warmest touch of amber
on his dry cracked lips.

Then, she burned.
Oh, how she singed and sang.
She warmed his cold lesions.
She scorched his grand eloquence.
She doused his innards in fire.

She had been Roosevelt’s courage,
When he departed his wife’s bedside.
She had inspired iconographic hangings,
When the muse’s rope snapped short.
She had given the suitor succor,
As he pondered where the ring went wrong.

Now, he kissed her.
Then, he drank her.
Always, he needed her
Whiskey kiss.

The Northern Lights dance in unreachable ribbons
Above the head of a dead bull moose.
Stuffed and mounted on wall of tacky pine
Positioned above a false granite hearth.
He’s forced to stared out double glazed windows
and forever watch the shifting skies
While the winds susurrate solar cinders
and stream like a Styx of souls
Slain by excesses of encroaching sportsmen

His tufted brown ears perk up at the howl of the huskies
But its only wire forcing form into his preserved pelt
with his thick brown fur stopping abruptly at the neck.
His killers in their regicide cared not
for the long legs that carried him thousands of miles
Nor the broad shoulders that pushed down trees
In a passing attempt to scratch an itch
His only crime was his broad branching antlers
His crowning expressions of sexual prime

His jaw is pearled with gentle round teeth
Ringing a false mouth that hangs slack in mid bray
He tries to greet the shimmering skies
To bugle forth one more call of clashing battle
As if he could rear up on hind legs and clatter his hooves
To declare this territory, “Mine”
But that plastic mouth was molded in Texas
And mass produced into expressions of realism
speaking through acrylic gums and tongues

His glass eyes cannot perceive the heavenly hues
As they cavort above conifers encrusted in ice
He does not watch the silent parade of his scion
Marching by in a secreted trail known only to natives
His great grand son following in his hoof steps
Through the woods of an inherited kingdom
In another two seasons this one too will be dead
By a paid and pampered safari of some rich hunter
Who slept warm inside instead of looking up in wonder

Sometimes, I rather wish you died on the table,
That you and I had not been survivors.
You, the cancer statistic,
Me, the product of my childhood.
Then, we wouldn’t be a moral and a fable.

Yet, you continued to defy logic.
A defiant dervish, sallying and rallying,
Whirling, through the horde expectant.
Cockroaches deserve more praise.