Solitude

dolls and pictures
swear quietly at my distant memory.
clock ticks coupled with the ambiguity  

of an empty room,
absence writes a draft for me,
a note of withered leaves,
a kiss of arsenic lipstick.
like everyone else alone,
i chase the grasping truant.

probably playing hooky in some idea,
or perhaps a misbegotten word,
spoken in invariably false pride.
where could he be?

that dilated schoolboy
instituted into shallow verbs
lost in the loneliness of the summer air.