Charles Hansmann: THE LONELINESS JACKET

You wear it and it snows: tracks empty the park outside the museum. A promo pen blues

your breast-pocket lining, and a snag starts to pull at your sleeve. The last one left

is as good as extinction. So says the quote on the leaking plastic.

But someone’s pinkie shined of wax on this second-hand tweed

flecks the lapel with an old, cleared hearing – conversation recorded in a stain.

The branches listen in, for this tree is like talk and there’s always a point

from which you are behind it, windows lighting up in the dinosaur wing.

by Charles Hansmann

Sea Cliff, New York

first published in Snap Poetry Journal