Where it all ends up

We reduced, rationed

—the wind flaking our alveoli

A sucking that slowly-patiently-insidiously

rends our patrimony

Surreptitious agents swarm tunnels beneath pieties, widely disseminated,

coming up with their booty to the lidless eyes of vaults,

a reckoning of lost potentialities

While we, discarded into hunkered canisters,

fall comatose as our cells are lacerated and gathered

(knocked-out for the count)

After we are desiccated

only gray coinage will remain,

desolate and powerful