Grief is a foreign empire

I huddle in fellow-man arms,

my neck unable to support my skull,

distant in an anonymous world

where my body's like a beast

in the slaughterhouse without grace,

a soulless creature

in endless longing;

everything familiar and customary

undressed and torn,

suddenly and all at once,

and the cold does with me what it will

in the blinding chill of light