How to write about happiness
Without discussing how it leaves?
How to write about happiness
Without remembering its previous betrayal?

How do you write it
In a way that preserves even just a single drop
Of joy.
How do I reach into a glass jar
And pull it out, whole, untouched

Oh, but I’ve touched it.
Touched it to pull it out
Fingerprints on barely hardened resin
Every ring is a tinge of sorrow.
Sickened it with a sadness.

And every moment is this way
So, so grieved.
Grieving happiness, poisoned
Then tell me, how to write

Of laughter and letters and living?
Distill the very climax of every joy
Recount it, relive it, recreate it--
Yet every road leads us here.
Equilibrium is conditional.
So I write of tears, of silences, of death
Demarcate the parallel lines

Over and over and over
Until they converge in a fevered haze
And tells me that they are one and the same
A poison older than time:
The End.