I no longer focus any energy
On the latest zinc smelter in Tennessee.
Death always changes your perspective,
Makes the meaning of life a little more
Fluid, knowing what the departed have
Yet to do, how they still spin it through
The air, whisper into December trees
Waiting on the few brown leaves to give way.
The dead respect the new, perhaps more so
Than us, for they know the only way to
The final draft is through continuous revision,
Throwing the bathwater out to get the baby
Or at least its eyes, to look at every
New opportunity to try, to get it right
Without too much recall of how things went
South, for innocence can't abide failure
It needs to learn how to fail
So it can try to figure out why
It failed, usually some variation
Of not having faith in oneself,
How the lack that kept one back was what
Could not be manifested in belief,
The sacrosanct, what precedes even our birth
But doesn't seem to survive it long.
Ah, but suicides are such a fine line.
We lose hope by degrees, without knowing
How we've changed, when the fog finally clears
And we find ourselves unworthy of the sun
That shines, after all, on everyone's
Sins of commission and omission alike,
What was not received in the self but given
To what was only, in the end, not that.
