Belaboring the Pointless

You pace the parquet, prey and paraclete, incomplete, discreetly beat
By clocks that mock in lockstep rhyme - the temps perdu, the stale repeat.
You call it Sehnsucht, call it lack, call it the black-backed debt of dawn,
A pawn withdrawn from every lawn where hope once grazed, then wandered on.

Your mirror majors in derision, makes incision after incision;
Each vision splits with cruel precision - prism-schism, self-collision.
“Memento mori,” murmurs mortar in the wall behind your bed;
The plaster pastor speaks much faster than the living in your head.

You count the costs in ghostly glosses, losses crossing other losses;
Your thoughts wear grooves like ancient roads through bogs and barrows, graves and mosses.
The moon hangs loose above the roofs, a noose of light, a pale lampoon;
It croons old tunes in silver ruins, out of tune and much too soon.

You study joy philologically, etymologically, pathologically;
Trace every bliss to an abyss almost comically, chronologically.
The French say ennui, Germans Weltschmerz, Latin mutters vanitas;
You hoard them all like stamps from hell, each phrase a small and splendid glass.

For every night refuses flight. The dark grows sharp; the dark grows bright.
The wound of being keeps accruing interest through the hours of white.
You curse the curse in seven tongues; you spit at stars; you damn the sky;
But still the lungs conduct their business, still they billow, still they sigh.

And there’s the joke that breaks no yoke, the pun no sun can quite outshine:
You seek an end to end all ends, yet endings fail to stay in line.
The grave remains a grammar mark imagined by the aching brain;
Meanwhile the sentence staggers onward through the weather, through the rain.

And you endure - not noble, merely local to the hurt you bear;
A tenant in a tenement of air, despair, repair, compare.
The years file past in masks of glass; the heart keeps artfully askew.
And every dawn, that tawdry con, arrives and rhymes itself with you.