Like single people everywhere I feel myself to be in exile from a promised land I after all emerged from a conjoining, one cushioned and unlonely act I want some personally satisfying simulation of that moment back--as if my birthright were embrace upon demand.

Cut off from her attractive pain, adrift to wander, slipping behind the hilly horizon a tower, a ladder of tresses, the plaintive call for another issuing from the highwayside office park bunker where she obeys the new commandment to commute as one, darkened windows glitter in the woods, the Exit rose beguiling, uselessly. Her attractive pain, sweet vacant gingerbread house in the woods I wander.

Across the dizzying mountain gorges of the moment, hope dangles from a straw borne in the last surviving condor's beak, at best a barren nesting.