A Lamentation

A Lamentation

They were offered Infinity, and yet
They chose a cold and blackened hearth.

I pity them, for I am too scared to pity myself.

The Truth spoke to them and they answered
And their Answer danced across Terra

And now their mouths are silent
Limbs flailing blindly at the resounding blackness

Refracting shafts of broken Light
Warped mirrors of the fog-ridden Sun

Each bearing dying embers of some Fire
Felt by all, known by none

Living under shadows of the Temple
Sons of a lost inheritance

Groping for the branches of one Tree
Snarled by the roots of Another

Decrying that which is by rights theirs
Imbued self-hate, stunted souls

Living in them lies the Truth, the Howl of Beyond
Living as they do, they burn their eyes and cut their tongues

They were offered Transcendence, and yet
They chose a hole of dirt and lies.

I pity them, for I am too scared to pity myself. 

Stones

I heard the stones cry out over the horizon.

They wake me.

Keening air runs over half-buried shack, carcass that Nature's jackals picked clean. Gray-blue wind snakes in from outside and tugs the sheet off.

Cold then heat.

Hear the stones again. See a sunset half a world away. Sky's blood-fire cauterizes wound between earth and myself.

I become whole for an instant.

Soul-embers pierce skin and fiber and meat and bone, and then more. Drink in the honey-wine, Gods-blood running from hand outstretched from stone and stream and old millhouse in woods pockmarked with unmelted snow blanketed in Dawn's dying fog. Feels like sword in the gut as it goes down but the pain is ecstasy. Sweat and tears like sun-melted glacier and dirt under fingernails like flecks of gold.

Find myself under the skein, shack-carcass left behind. Fingers of juniper brush the horizon as sun comes up out of the butte and warmth intimates vitality and dog shifts against my head. I've not died but something greater.

Born, alive, from dead womb in dead land.

The Ship

Broken spars on lighted shore
Bones of ship keep them alive

Dead hulk out of Ædger
cannibalized by its children

Long had they rode the sea
They, of the North

The end comes now

Huddled together, sharing light
And warmth, and strength

On a spat of sea-dust
Below the cliffs of Brittany

Bodies flung together by fate and by wave,
Waiting for an end

November in Owyhee

Fire in the skies
Embers of souls dusting the black

Sun's pallid sister ascends the star-stair
Children of the night cry for their Mother

Mesquite flames before me
Book in hand, dog and gun to the side

Embers of souls
Scarring the November desert sky