Binding bed

Sought intimate spaces

for self-

lost private places

for nurturing health.

Grew weary with waning

insistence,

wilted and arid, the stem

aches with thirst

the worst exposure

to lunar light

this side of mourning

the death of circus dreams.

It seems the sun disperses

its golden dust

according to an architecture

of ideal.

Beholden to the barriers molded

by hand-

curses stand as they must, in spite of us

for a time.

As last

sunsets free

the stars, placing winking faces

astronomical units apart

and fixed on never being

yours or mine.

“Our tendency to build walls is useful only to provide a starting point for self-definition, walls that contain the bed in which we are born, in which we dream, we breed and we die; but outside the walls lies Siddhartha;s realization that all human beings grow old, all are prone to nightmare and disease, and all must ultimately come to the same implacable end. Books endlessly repeat that one same story.” (“The Library at Night” by Alberto Manguel p. 229)

Artwork by Evelyn De Morgan, 'The Prisoner' c. 1908 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.