The Single Man

What mark
Does a single man leave;
When shadow claws
Across the earth
Stubby fingers plough
And uproot rotting vegetation
Does he roll a landslide without thinking?

What role does he play,
Preserving his pickled prospects
In jars of chutney,
Lining them up on the window sill
He should protect them from crows,
Those famished black birds
They circle his home,
Roosting in the bare bones
Of a skeleton tree

No. He does not see them
For they are dead to him
Dead pin prick eyes
And dead feathers of lack-lustre texture
He closes out the likelihood
That these aberrations are his normality
And continues cooking up the future
In his oversized coal fired kitchen.