Cruel World

Your belongings belched throughout the apartment
make you sad as a broken machine
strewn of its disparate parts.

Your family and I
put things into boxes—things to keep,
things to donate, things to trash.

In three months a young man
wears your sweater and still smells your heavy cologne,
knitted deep inside the weave.

He sort of becomes you.
The closest thing we have: your smell
and warm skin—approximates
being close to you.

If we are not our bodies
what else can we assume?

People vanish, bodies decompose—
possessions endure.

The world is cruel.
The world is very, very cruel.

Jensen’s Living Things Shopping | Cruel World | Matter | Remains | Last Apparition

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