What’s this? A peephole to another world?
Been lost under the grime of everydays
Uncovered now, a story half unfurled
Be quiet as the tale before you plays –
It will be gone again soon, so hold still
To put it simply there are three main things
Anxiety, some live bones, and a hill
That star in this quaint parable with wings
If you would not mind putting down your life
And sparing but a moment – gather round!
For sentiments and passions here are rife
And lustrous-ready for the telling, wound
So, reader, if you’re ready to begin
This bard will start before the tale gets thin.

As we creep near a candle trailing smoke
Inside a darkened room with aching floor
There sits a woman penning stroke by stroke
Of sighing words, beseeching him for more
“Oh, darling, you know ‘twas but all in vain,
You know that ‘twas impossible to win!”
And sobbing her remorse and helpless pain.
Would streak the letter, to which she would pin
Her hopes that her beloved was all right
She’d fold it up with misbegotten hands
And send it off into the jaded night
Yet heeding her own well-based reprimands
She wouldn’t dare expect any response
Now, let’s depart, while bleary lights ensconce.

If you will travel with me down below
For just one moment, under cobblestones
Of wilting gray and jailbirds in a row
You’ll find an imitation of sad bones
Two shrunken feet, a pair of torpid eyes
A semblance of a man in supine slouch
And then: a gust of air, the stench defies
As one walks in, kicks bones still in their couch
“There’s someone here to see you,” says the guard
He’s followed by a beaten, brown-eyed page
The boy enters with trepidation jarred
He drops a square, then turns to disengage
And only when the two of them are gone
Does this man see the note bundled in dawn.

The third and final scene we’ve yet to see
Belongs to one with rumpled hair and smile
A smallish orphan with a wish to be
Leans crookedly upon a sagging stile
A tired glance; his shuffling feet move on
But soon, invigoration takes his stride
And, stumbling, he finds light to climb upon
And, staggering, lungs thrum where they reside
His conquest won, the boy now overlooks
A grassy hill, immune to outside fears
In just an hour, he’ll trespass farms and brooks
Conveying but a note, well fraught with tears
And where will he deliver her poor groans?
Why, to a jail cell, to a pile of bones.

Three separate flashes of three separate lives
Conjoined by fate to trickle out a web
Where each unconsciously toward center strives
There they would meet as patience starts to ebb
Collision seems a given in this case
Strewn dreams and fancies will litter the street
Whether the change they spurn or they embrace
Each, as they live, will not accept defeat
Why is the man of bones consigned to jail?
Why would the woman pen him such a post?
What has the orphan boy to do with mail?
And what will happen at the far endmost?
Such questions are futile to submit
As everything there is – I’ve told you it.