The drawers slide open with the sound of a dry cough,
Revealing the archaeology of a Sunday afternoon.
Here is the collection of silver spoons that never tasted anything but dust,
And a stack of postcards from cities that have since changed their names.
The air in this room is stagnant, a thick broth of expired dreams,
And the smell of mothballs guarding empty suits.

I am sifting through the sediment of a nervous life.
A keychain from a summer fair,
A spectacles case line with frayed velvet,
A map with a circle drawn around a house that was torn down in 1994.
He spent sixty years worrying about the alignment of the stars,
Counting his pulse in the dark,
Building a fortress out of receipts and polite conversation.

But the clock on the mantle has already forgotten his shadow.
The wallpaper doesn’t miss his leaning weight.
There is a profound, echoing silence in the kitchen
Where he once thought his opinions held the gravity of planets.

Outside, the crows are busy with the business of being crows.
The traffic flow is rhythmic, indifferent, a river of cold neon.
In ten minutes, the memory of his scent will be scrubbed away by a pine-scented breeze.
In twenty, his chair will be a ghost-shape in a thrift store window.
The universe is a vast, mechanical yawn,
And we are the lint trapped in the gears for a flickering second
Before being puffed into the gray static of the void.

All that architecture of the ego,
The delicate lace of ‘who I am’ and ‘what I’ve done,’
Just a pile of damp cardboard in a rain-slicked alleyway.
The ink on the page is already fading into the color of a bruise,
Leaving nothing by the quiet, mocking whistle of the wind.
Through a keyhole that no longer belongs to anyone.