yet more poetry (old Spencer stuff)

We are students of the same subject, you and I
strangely quiet in our comfort
drowning ourselves
in the inexorable

When everything that has been
has been spoken, and everything that
cannot be is safely catalogued
we can still remain here, alone together
in the last chance of a dying moment
in pictograms and sonoglyphs
that give our histories the lie
and smudge our self-portraits

Will these heretical monuments
to an imagined circumstance
be rubbed and dated, reinstated
into canonical glory someday?

Listen, it's simple:
simply smile at enervated intervals
wait for the signal fire to light,
and in that crucial figure find a moment for yourselfish desires
the kind that roll around the tongue
and dance in desperate measures, full
to bursting with their own depravity
real enough for our time
and our time, too, is real enough
for the children that we were (not) to grow, old already
inside, far away