I made my goodbyes to Mother and Father, sister and brother--perhaps not wrought well enough in the style of prayer. The body of circumstance layed across my lips, sewed them shut with old threads, as if the truth was blood and the mouth a wound. When the giant of Truth threw his glow behind the hill at the back of the tongue, there were times when the words like Humpty-Dumpties fell--in fragments, though--and this is the sharpest onion, irony to curve its flavor round the egg: the carapace remained. Which of us are Speakers? Which of us has ever spoken? Which of us will lace up our sneakers, head for the back door, and admit that the old egg has broken? Which bard will not sell his thought for the lie of a perfect rhyme? Who will bait with fathomless water night, to let a thousand songs drift off with broken rhymes the streetlights tell in trembling paths and parables, and call that the final form, ancestral hall, or broken home of time?