The bead necklace lay coiled in its box,

wasted gift, while the cutting board softened.

It was a sort of sport, no? The way we

volleyed optimism? Shucks. In the end

we shared our meals unwilling when in lieu

of ambulant wishes, empty dishes 

might have been more filling. Take back your key;

save me, I cling as lichen to these rocks.

What will it take to lid this belching stew?

Daunting familiarity; to’ve met

before we’ve ever met and to carry

my name like the tied stem of a cherry.

No more watch the red sun’s broad amulet

deck low fruit I’d striven for from ditches.

I writhed behind tableaux of tangential 

friends I'd abruptly never see again

now the vector’d been withdrawn. Sequential 

loose ends, swallowed links of the anchor’s chain,

strobed shade beneath the helicopter’s fan.

   I tried not to feel so devastated,

   burrowed into specious bliss but, oddly,

   I was thriving in unexpected ways:

   Notions of kinship badly outdated 

   were let to recede downstream and replaced

   as Expectation, that ghoulish con-man,

   coughed out his lungs like a foreign body

   and drowned in a crock of horseshit as wide 

   as the ocean, a noble suicide.