The world was not a house without kindness
Never meant to be lived in, but neither was it
Intending any of the kindnesses it bestowed
On bemused and ever-hungry inhabitants.
It was haunted without concession to ghosts
Of design and purpose that that crept
Into the joins and moaned about the cold.
Perhaps it had formed itself. Surely nothing
Remotely like us could have formed it.
We held the only ideas it had, and suffered
For the infection. It did not suffer for us,
Though we swanned around its halls,
Banging and knocking and demanding,
Making fresh messes and scrubbing them
Out again, pretending to be stewards
When we weren't so much as guests, only
Maggots in the Aristotelian sense,
Spontaneously generated squatters.
Hunt the sheep, run the river, mine uranium,
Jump from the rocks with ropes attached,
We couldn't more than scratch the varnish
Always fading and regenerating anyway.
Anyway, the razored contrast line along
The empty blue and the crumbling rock
Props of the given palace was all the script
The palace itself had invented. No one here.
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