No Talent For Certainty

It’s sunrise in the ruins,
The day has come again,
There’s only what is here, today
Of all that may have been —

It’s daybreak in the ruins,
But maybe this time we
Won’t throw away what good we have
In search of

Vanity

The milltown boys went off to war,
But only some came back;
The girls worked in the factory
To fill the wartime lack —

But all of that was years ago,
The mills are long shut down,
While those who knew the tumult sleep
Out on the edge

Of town

Left behind places,
Gone to rot;
That we foresook
And then forgot.

Left behind places,
Wild and free;
Sometimes, alone
Is what’s meant

To be

We ran along the underground,
The light was on our faces;
We drank the night in Tanqueray,
In secret places —

We made ourselves a fantasy,
Though misbegotten:
Two children of the underground
So soon

Forgotten

The symmetry of traveling,
A thing we often lack —
For though we go and dare to cross,
We cannot make it back.

Then only as the decades die,
Do we see where we’ve been —
The undergrowth that marks the way
We cannot go

Again

Chaos, structure, loneliness,
The “I-can’t-find-it” phrase —
Because some terrors have their nights,
And others have

Their days