A gymnasium or a cavern
Hear this beat a longing
Virtue torn from sky
and flung upon the cardboard
floorboards of this place
They scurry the mice of this new world
intermittent invisible between
the bodies strewn that imprint surfaces with the gravity of their ideas
that travel particles of gas through space at high temperatures
and spin themselves dizzy under lights that dot the room with foreign color
White lighted things they relax in the shade of a body fainting
and mince their claws on the corrugated paper thick till its interstices show
A hole breaks inevitable in the center of this cavernous space
and the echo shoots its way downward out of doors
Reverberations threaten to collapse this house of cards
Shivers down its spine are small whites made manifest in the forgotten
dusts that shake their way clear of crevices and filter a film of
snow, tarnish coats with off-whites and greys and specks of darker things
And as a funnel, it’s a whirlpool a tornado a blackhole sucking in every insignificant smile and touch and all that’s left at end is blankness not emptiness—blankness, there’s a difference and you know it
The mice know it too and they racket up an offshoot ravine and spread themselves amongst all the bodies that are swaying slowly effaced and finally coherent
And the rodents claw their way up legs and over anything nearby or present
but there are no morals left and no worries nor cares
the cracks in the cards and the splinters in the cardboard laughed as they sped past outward in a tickle at the corners

In a remote spot of corrugated floor a last moral cowers and in it there is hope—an objective hope—not hope itself, but the vestige of a desire of a thing, perchance enough: a blueprint torn, remade, torn again, its lines white and jagged but the picture unchanged