Failure

Staring at his own shrunken eyes
he might have just woken from a coma
understanding for the first time
the whisper of his dark life.

His glasses and the mirror conspire to expose him.
He’s a post-modern study in suffering
he’d seen in a book.
Nowhere can he find his younger self.

The face, carved, reminds him,
of a family steeped in meanness
the whole unpleasant portraiture.
This leads to knowledge.

His parents who could never love him
abandoned him eventually.
Now he faces the claustrophobic belief
in the marketplace of death.

He must agree with, not blame them
those finger-pointing soothsayers.
He has amounted to little
and soon, to even less.