The Urban Elf

Marshmallows roasting on a funeral pyre
The lead paint sweetness of unrequited desire
Like lambs on tombstones of children gone
The poetic longing for a heart not won
In the anonymity of autumn’s grey rain
Lost are the tears at the thought of a name
No sign of the heart singing its a dirge
For soul and loins and their unwelcome urge
For the dreamt and desired and imagined embrace
Through the echoing halls of a shell left in place
In a life lived in mauve and in black and in grey
Tragedy can be a comfort in its backhanded way
Like the soft wet fog of the churchyard swallows
And obscures and abstracts a wanderer to a shadow

- Edmund DeForest