I Wonder If You Always Tell The Truth

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Smoke

The moon hangs
His cold curl of a traitor's smile
Alone on the sky;
Empty but for the stars.
Those standards of loneliness, falling
Into disrepair as morning encroaches
Upon the end of an epoch, unconsciously passed.

All that has been broken is all that remains;
Our age we bear with unnatural grace,
While we divide the riches amassed.
In preparation of the second benediction,
The messengers have been despatched.
Their marathon errand a contradiction
Akin to that alive in the martyred Greek.

Again, he questions the window of your return.
A usurper, fabled into existence.
Or from -
It is all the same without her.
There is no more meaning
To the dying words of the saint
Than in the murmur of the wind.
Not that there is less:
Both share their stories indiscriminately.

This disappearance of days,
Existing without the range of the setting sun,
Spent, roaming between resurrection and ascension;
Awaiting an invitation to creation,
Receiving nought
Outside a postcard from the apocalypse.

This home but a kingdom where hours preside,
And Time's dictate reduces our movements
To mere mechanics.
Reason has been forfeited to the favour of release;
A freedom sought at our own expense.

What cares the future for the past?
Cause has been removed from solution,
Guilt from punishment.
We have narrowed possibility down to the infinite -
An impatient people, longing for the end of time.

Prophets fade, prophesies with them,
Sinking to the depths of iniquitous history.
No more do they register on the conscious,
Nor between the ends of the earth
Where we go when the sky descends.

This library of words, drying
Beneath a sun, closing in fast.
Swollen faces surrounded by thought,
Or just the thought of a thought -
A memory struggles for breath.

When spied from behind this veil of sound,
The silence of the stars abounds.
Even the nearest is out of reach,
Though long ago I ceased to measure their retreat.

This night he walks, face on shoulder
Askance at what follows,
While I shuffle unmolested through invisible streets:
A disciple of decadence,
I bloom in my insignificance.

Absent of mind but not of memory,
He curses the sun that shines only at his back,
As if the past were more important than any future.
That low sun casts a dark shape -
Long, it stretches behind,
Hiding as he turns to face the light,
As if it were afraid of its creator -
More, then, a reflection than a shadow.

These hands which felt the form of the wind
Are now disguised in pockets as I meander,
Distrustful of a world whose frame they created.
Their moulding fingers that held the clouds,
The thumbs that pressed the ocean's floor,
Have curled around sharp fists:
Defensive against their inventions,
Fearful of their power.

Beneath a blackening night
I weave under its influence; listening,
Drunk on the darkness, for the music -
And, in my hope, am forgotten;
Wanting for sound.
Not a note will be heard -
The maestro of the midnight is gone -
The telling of the final end.

The Amen upon her lips was a lie.
Praying to a ghost for a ghost's return.
Folded hands clasped to the breast
Withhold the word she dares not speak;
The bow of the head is more
Than submission to that which cannot be believed.
The cell door closes -
Isolation is on the rise.
Turning, she smiles an obsolete smile
And forgets the future she left behind.

Upon his graveyard seat,
An Appalachian sunset for company,
Is this to be his final home?
To look down across his fleeing footsteps
Which take their place beside watered prints,
Incessant reminders of difference and deficience.

Where are the ones who walk the waves?
Whose mind and manner can do no wrong;
They who sang the universe in haunting rhyme;
Who invented and relinquished the earth -
When will they return to claim their prize?
To stand before the highest peak
And conquer it with vanitous words.

Others, still, walk this razor's edge,
To write in vain of a world unknown.
Does even such a place exist, where truth is free?
Though ours may be new,
Even Parsifal, so pure, had to strive for his grail.

My monologue mind in singular reminiscence
Of watered-down memories and half-naked confessions;
Of an age of elixir
When, at your insistence,
Was I not the hero of your low-born existence?
And now, in unrelenting curse,
As eye-drying hands find solution to your tears,
I slander my obsession.

The ghost of a smile,
Flickers beneath the intrigue of prying eyes;
Their voice, in distant echoes,
Quoting history to explain our future.
Barely beats the heart a metronomic hum.

She from her window of freedom,
Praying in smoke-signals to her hindsight-saviour.
One corridor'd view of an autumnal eve,
Dressed in dusk,
A soul on the wing of meditation,
Expectation met knowledge beyond curiosity's doubt -
A mutual recognition and she knew she was right.