Drizzle Poem by William Matthews

Baudelaire: 'The dead, the poor dead, have their bad hours.'
But the dead have no watches, no grief and no hours.

At first not smoking took all my time: I did it
a little by little and hour by hour.

Per diem. Pro bono. Cui bono? Pro rata.
But the poor use English. Off and on. By the hour.

'I'm sorry but we'll have to stop now.' There tick but
fifty minutes in the psychoanalytic hour.

Vengeance is mine, yours, his or hers, ours, yours again
(you-all's this time), and then (yikes!) theirs. I prefer ours.

Twenty minutes fleeing phantoms at full tilt and then
the cat coils herself like a quoit and sleeps for hours.