The Lost

I.
I am thinking of the going of things
of the eventual tiger
of love 
of the disappearance 
of certain trees
or all trees. 
there is an ocean of things that 
went and can't ever be got back
not if we prayed hard and 
skun our knees doing it
like the moa like the mammoth like 
the dripping minutes like unmouthed words 
the relentless passing and eventual forgetting
threshold of the Place of Lost Things--
what the old mapmakers were 
thinking when they marked the End of the World 
on their beige parchment and trembled 
like malarial surgeons--

II.
which I would like to visit, and get lost in myself 
among the mysterious dead among the old stone walls 
that run on to the moon among the dreams
devoured by breakfast among
gods we invented or murdered 
by way of my feet tracking beaches
cobbled in missing pennies.

III.
to build a kind life there 
among the Gone which is limitless and
unsubmitting to further time
and not lament 
the world of the Present and Accounted 
with its long list of Things That Shall Exist 
each with its little check-box, 
each with its little expiration date.
​