The Brooklyn Rail

In your room everything is
least as it can be and still
remain a thing. Theft
in advance of property,
not poverty but that
the aperture in beams
and rents breaks in with
regularity, to that great lie
of suffering, that empathy
is proof that one is good.
And I misheard.
Teach us by our fate as by
indifference.

Clean as tinsel is clean,
ghostless as a rind,
that in your sight the toy
banners, no less true
for their small size, say:
If the room has changed,
is it because I have changed.
How ludicrous
the poem is then, the life—a giant
iridescent wing the ant
in shadow of drags
backwards to its queen.