Jon Nakapalau

flagged so

that this perception

of a glittering future can
with such deliberate hiding

tell of pick in all the colors a
single brightness that can equal

the day of someone who is alive in

a world that wants to shroud the young
in the newest fashion of that eternal tailor

who cuts new cloth with his gored scythe in

busy nights and all will attend his final ball so
that looking at each other with black gaze those

dead will see mirrored in the sockets of earthly foe

the years taken in lost harvest that now all must eat
at this table laid plentiful with so much bitter fruit that is

rotten with seeds planted into this dead field of lost years.