You Look Like I Feel

Dirt on my chin and I wonder: am I already in the ground? Like a toy turned real, I cannot shed the sense that I have died. The German word for Heaven’s the same as the German word for sky. On hearing a cruel prince was in danger, I prayed for him to thrive, not for his own sake, but for the concubines, sure to end up buried along. To my real face, a man once crowed i ruined you , and though he did, the joke’s on him: he ruined me only for this world, and this world is not long for itself. The Earth, that ever-loving but distrustful kin, keeps leaving us just a little pocket money when it dies, never the land —