How do we read stardust in fine print?
 How can we find silence within a constant chorus of speech and penitence?
  
 I hear only the uncertainty of two a.m.
 I see only the life of a dauntless troubadour, 
 searching through the shadows and singing in riddles.
  
 You, the seeker of yes, a purveyor of a zealotry I cannot bear.
 Something in you distracts me as rhetorical, a doctrine 
 without question, clamoring for fools.
  
 Folding my own cool fingers, I settle into tiny moments.
 There is a redness of hands, a clanging of brass:
 a blasphemous asceticism masquerading as righteousness.
  
 There is emptiness in a doorway without a pulse—
 severe as the recitation of all that is bloodless,
 those who are at one with pride, nothing but
 ego resting on sloping shoulders, long in the tooth.
  
 In the sleeves of my well-worn coat
 I feel my veins thrumming like trees
 and sinking like roots.
 I live in a sweater made of holes, 
 of moths.