Remember that old game of telephone?
You’d hear the shadow you didn’t want to see.
The message you receive is yours alone,
a whispered piece of what you’ve always known:
your future opens into elegy.
Remember that old game of telephone?
You know it’s waiting. You hear it in the tone
of voice, the distant, muffled certainty
(the message you receive is yours alone):
the body without disease is yours on loan;
you’ll lose the shimmer on that cypress tree.
Remember that old game of telephone?
When the source is far away, a distant drone,
you disavow the signs that guarantee
the message you receive is yours alone,
coiled in every cell and hair and bone.
And trying to forget, we find that we
remember that old game of telephone:
the message we receive is ours alone.