The end is temporary,
touch-and-go,
torched and resurrected
in a circle of ash—
up humor, up tenor,
upending those
who stand in the way—
the sender and the spirit
marked to replace
the recently taken,
the displaced citizens
left without a host,
disembodied frost
sucking blood from bone.
Jim Johnstone won a CBC Poetry Prize and has published four collections of verse.
