Does a headstone speak to you too?
Do you hear their voices?
Friends and family from beyond?
You’re not imagining it,
There is an energy among the resting,
A family reunion through cemetery gates,
A last chance at reconciliation,
Or chastisement,
Life lessons,
Spiritual advice,
Placations too late
And loving words missed,
It’s meditative,
The feeling behind you,
That is your ancestors behind you,
And they are your allies.
Heed it.
The symphony commences,
As the sky grows dark,
Metallic warnings in the air,
Cacophonous and shrill,
Like lost souls lamenting the plight of the living,
From their vantage points,
Those sirens have seen the approaching flags,
Riding upon rockets and helicopter blades,
Their hymn warns of fire and brimstone,
Depleted uranium fireworks,
This is no party tune,
But the raucous dirge of a nation.
I remember that quill,
And the desiccated hand that led it,
Candles barely illuminating the dread at work,
Manipulated by the rotten hand of a poet,
Skeletal and rank fingers ushering the pens path,
Fetid flakes of flesh falling upon the page,
This ancient quill,
A veteran of many campaigns,
Wars of calligraphy and manuscripts,
Crafted from the feather of a long-extinct bird,
A yellowed shako worn atop,
This tool was marshal for the ink spot rank and file,
In this writing desk mortuary,
The musk of death runs deep,
Poet and pen rotting together,
Twin tombstones upon a page,
Writing like this is a form of necromancy,
Horror creating beauty.
The beats of life are undeniably beautiful,
But treacherous by the same measure,
Like performing ballet on a cliff edge,
A knife blade,
A ciseaux through the years,
From the first position to a precarious cabriole,
All smiles while waltzing upon pointy stones,
It is a radiant performance,
Worthy of a standing ovation,
But all take bets on which foot will slip first,
This chalk stage of existence,
It’s a steep cliff face,
One we all ply our trade upon,
What lies below doesn’t bear thinking about,
Waves and scythes,
Dashing rocks and terminal coral,
It’s built upon limestone and inevitability,
In this great dance of life,
Even a prima ballerina tires,
We all slip eventually.
Throughout this thousand year war,
Numberless threads have been severed,
Both political and carotid,
Every fall gives rise to a cult,
A coven of worms,
A morbid congregation drawn together,
Each elongated creature both priest and disciple,
Each slain prince or pauper,
Becomes a temple of writhing masses,
Another prone parish of rot,
Erected on putrescent pillars,
Ribcages holding up their necrotic chapels,
Flesh is chewed away in ritual feasts,
Marrow supped like wine from bone,
These cultists are no fiends though,
It’s simply the way of the world,
Entropy and taxes being the only certainties,
Even the most triumphant and grand of us,
Shall be naught but a temple for the worms,
Little more than grisly alms,
Meat for the cult.
Among those fearsome boreal raiders,
When a warrior falls,
Respects must be paid,
For a warrior to rest easy,
Like a toll to the reaper,
A gift to the hereafter,
Like any legendary fighter has a moniker,
A warriors sword too has a name,
A hero in its own right,
And like any partner would hope for,
It was interred beside him,
The warriors sword was bent double,
Granted a warriors death itself,
And covered in the same graveyard dirt,
To lay still in the same valhalla.
This nursery is held often out of sight,
Behind church walls and ragged hedge lines,
Out of mind,
At least that’s the hope,
This garden of corpses,
Decorated by obelisks and headstones,
It’s home to crops like you and I,
Planted here by fate and chance,
The rows are a series of stories carved into granite,
This old soil holds more than morbid botany,
There are memories planted here,
From babes cooing to final embraces,
Joy and rancor and fear preserved,
Every romance and broken heart under the sun,
All eventually find themselves interred here,
Along with worms and flies,
Awaiting a harvest that will never come.
Death haunts the depths,
A manmade shark,
A machine of war fathoms down,
In the cold below,
It is on the trail of prey,
A cyclopean eye guiding the way,
Stalking those unaware seals of steel above,
Merchant ship or frigate,
Following the reverberations of their iron lungs,
The word is given,
Doom is silently unleashed at knots,
And once the hunt is over,
And the prey is scrap metal,
Fade like orcas into the dark.
I am afflicted,
Diseased,
Infested,
Privy to rigor mortis of the lungs I fear,
A piece of me turned renegade,
Blackened internally like rot,
Respiring becomes a feat of heroics,
My torso doubling over like a crushed can,
Hailed by naught but wheezing,
Breaths like razor blades scrape at my lungs,
Each compression a cut deeper,
Superheated talons across flesh,
To speak of it is blood specks on a napkin,
To hear of it is a death knell,
To an ensemble of splutter and hacking.
WorldofHarley 