Try to unearth, explore

the water-clock secrets of the moths.

If really, they recreate the womb

or merely, they masquerade their amusement.

Like the cruellest home video

there is deadness behind the laughter,

and it was Beckett who

wrote that nothing is funnier than

man’s unhappiness. It grows on us like moss,

this search for secrets.

Unending shelves of spines,

and a Shakespeare folio, employed as makeshift pillow,

have not so far revealed why the viola swells

and inflates the unrequited.

We’re left to search the rain-soaked cobbles

looking with absent eyes

for the clear line,

the answer,

the point.