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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.
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