Man Cave

Mothers tell
stories of our children's
children who will learn
to sell daylight by the ounce.

They speak not of now,
but what is yet to come: forecasts
based on fortresses
of solitude. No man
is an island except a dying one.

In the final hour, his voice
cracks like the barricades
he built to keep the horizon
at bay.

O say, can you hear
the frail echoes of a pharaoh
with a hardened heart?

The cavernous cries of a last
man standing, then falling...
hollowed out?

Mothers tell
stories of a world that doesn't end
so much as it folds in
on itself.