The lens is cracked, the focus pulled too tight,
Where mountains form from grains of shifting sand.
A kingdom built on shadows in the light,
Held by a clenched and shivering, narrow hand.
It stalks the halls of triviality,
To weigh a word, to measure out a slight,
Transforming molehills into tragedy
To feed the hunger of a bruised appetite.
A splinter felt becomes a fatal sword,
An absent nod, a long-remembered thorn;
The heart, a miser of a jagged hoard,
Finds comfort in the sharpest edge of scorn.
It is a shield of glass against the vast,
A way to shrink the world to fit a cage;
Reliving every ghost of slights long past,
To script a war upon a postage-page.
Beneath the spite, a quiet, hollow fear,
A garden choked by weeds of small design,
Where what is distant never can appear,
Because the eye is locked on what is mine.
The bridges burn for nothing, day by day,
The air grows thin, the spirit comes to rust;
While life, in grandeur, softly slips away,
Lost in the counting of the settling dust.
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