After the purloined precision

of his illustrious career,

a cultured ensemble

of phantom regrets,

an upscale rhetoric girded by grace,

and by the calculated symmetry

of a few truly exquisite lines,

typeset, reprinted, and autographed for fans...

After multiple awards

for his counterfeit passions

so collected, prized, and widely anthologized

that he sometimes can't recall

what was real and what wasn’t,

still intact is the fear

that his work will be forgotten

although he's planning to describe

with snake-eyed exactitude

that terrible foreboding.

Michael Colonnese is the author of Sex and Death, I Suppose, a hard-boiled detective novel with a soft Jungian underbelly, and of two prize-winning poetry collections, Temporary Agency and Double Feature.  He lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains, near Hendersonville, North Carolina.