5 P.M. Poem by Louis Kasatkin

The mordant day drifts along its course
into the deep deep of evening,
its hours exhausted by a futility
arduously wrought with effort, endeavour, exasperation;
leaving us to be put to sleep
the 'us' who henceforth shall never awaken,
the 'us' who became as dormant
as hallway carpets waiting to be rolled up
ready to be tossed away for junk;
onto the ephemeral detritus of the rest of
our lives, our existence, our waking days,
rendered redundant, obsolete, ossified
secreted in a glass display cabinet
at the back of a Museum long closed,
shuttered to all the World's inquisitiveness;
there to subsist in an absence of purpose
without respite nor recourse to those
meanings which the days once gave to them,
once upon a time, a long long time ago
before the advent of the indifference
that caused the mordant day to drift along
its course into the deep, deep.