My poem for today. I'll call it melancholia meets the hounds of spring

This hand crabbed from the key dulled letter

Sits, paleolithic, on the obsolete absolute page

Its grip reduced to a spastic C

Illustrating some text on graphology

Section graphomania, dangers of. Notebooks

Hanself and gretel back to the storied youth

And up to the man long in the tooth

If teeth there are so wrought by seasons

Of unheeded sugar, the slave produce stored

In poisoned plenty – is it not in this plenty I lived?

And how my happiness grieved

To see its imperial thunder mocked and tin

Reduced to a mere tinkle in the heart.

But what of it, weeper? Is it proved

That the grave’s your major stockholder at fifty?

As though out of stiff fingers no nifty

Thought could throw off smothering bone

And you have to face alone, alone.