Leave me now
to my cemetery of old
Days and their
ghosts that stalk between the stones
Reciting loves
of flesh to bones. I hear
Their dead voices
and your last words; and though
There is no solace
in the sentence each
Constructs, no
more the morbid miracle
Of the cross
upon the pinnacle of
Calvary shall return me to the
womb.
I open my eyes
from the drug of faith
And see in ancient
light the ruins of men.
The faces there
no older than my own,
Their cheerless
eyes obsessed by nothing more
Than silence
in their breast. The beaten hearts
Whose curse of
youth blasphemed the myths of age
Are bared to
brave the rhetoric of prayer,
And perched upon
a pyramid to burn.
The bodies that
lived the simple terror
Toil in the cauldron
of the serpent’s court
While sold souls
sail the good night’s estuary
Through the mouthing
darkness where no dawn’s dream
Dilutes their
death’s lament; no morning light
To soothe the
kiss of time’s capricious lips.
His bloodied
ocean heaves the hell-bound hulk
And splinters
heaven on my hero’s grave.