A certain suffocation has descended on the trees.
The wind, rustling branch and brush, grows faint,
Slow, and halting. Feral children
Attack the passing businessmen with
Less than their usual alacrity.
They no longer take the time to rend
Pinstripe suits and corpses, to heave
Portfolio and briefcase off the cliff, ho,
As they used to. Now they just take the money,
Then stagger off, with bloody hands and runny noses.

Phoebe's room is shrinking. She hides her head
In hands and arms brittle from mineral deficiency.
Her little television, once a comfortable vacuum,
Now shrieks an endless signal of emergency.
O Phoebe! You shall not rot away, nor feel
The sandpaper hands of time roughly peel
The skin from your decalcified bones.
You'll huddle there forever preserved,
Forever about to be crushed by your collapsing flat.

It takes little effort
For Christoph to sit slumped on the window-seat,
To drool on the window-sill,
To breathe air infested by a weary family of gnats
Flying in and out the broken pane, and round his head.
It takes little effort for him
To stare at the bland window-desert,
To watch the window-rocks and window-wind, for hours.
When he sleeps he has window-dreams, and windows
Enough to fill the waiting-rooms of his mind.
Window-sand, window-cactus, window-room, window-window.