Soliloquy in a Split Screen Freeze Frame

Let me say this plainly. We are prettier alone.

These people who throw their walking in our faces.

These people with their walking.

There is one who stomps a puddle while on the phone

with his mother, a mother who somewhere

pours gin into a glass with how many fingerprints,

squalid smudges, petri dish. Terrible black in the snow,

hooves glutting on a horsepath, beastly footfalls.

The world is too much with us all; we are prettier

alone and alone, we clutter dirty in bad weather.

On house made of timber, on house made of _houses'

shadow, on hidden pipework bowing strings between walls

every hour on the hour meantime hush. Cobwebs:

holly for my worship, stewing chicken in a rusted pot

with years old tabasco and by night my solitude

metabolized by the body unto blankness.

Ravishing obsolescence, let me languish away these ages.

You are in Denmark and then you are one

block away and you are both times wholly obnoxious.

My singular rug with its singular prints denotes

trespasslessness because why upset the quiet but then

somewhere an unclean glass pours out its gin and is never

heard from again by anyone. We are merely beautiful alone.

In the sludgepath a ghost apes the move of a body, inhabits

a body that has thinned to nothing but still the walking,

still the filthy feet with their living muscle memory,

still the anthem thrumming in the narrows of ourselves.