After the War

In a urine-soaked military bedroll under the bridge the wino lapses into an uneasy slumber, twitching & curling up like a caterpillar in its final instar when the wasp’s hungry children start in at last on the nerve centers, having made a desolation of the rest,

& that warm feeling one had taken for love turns out to have been nothing but the fires of corrosion — the wrong kind of digestion in the gut

or the wrong kind of metamorphosis, in which the very cells are changed, yes, but no chrysalis will ever be spun

& the light spreads like a chemical spill above the river, blotting out the stars.