Seasons Among the Damned

At my desk the summers come and go,
Taking note of night’s fleeting glow.

The trees were autumn then,
Pale and dying with gentle hues;
The rotten browns, oranges, and reds
That always signifies memory.
It always seemed autumn then,
It always seemed 4 a.m.
On a brisk autumn morning then.
The silence, the silence absolute:
Only the ruminations of a mind
Aflame, forcing the sun to its perch,
Shook the night awake from its slumber.
Those mornings, on those mornings,
Oh, how I mourned for them:
I painted bravery on timid men,
Valour where weakness prevailed,
Honour on mythical epithets
And I thought the thoughts of the young
When the night is still
And the silence too much to bear.
I mourned for men, then,
I mourned for men with gun-powder fingertips,
Swollen livers and exhausted minds,
Enigmas called Man, glorified to Sainthood
And all the other machinations of the damned:
I mourned for those slain by their art
And played mime to their waning authority.
In those autumn evenings, then,
As the sun cast its last light upon the dying,
When the shadows grew long,
My silhouette carried its own woven loop,
Branded astride my throat,
And I thought the thoughts of the young
When the night is still
And the silence too much to bear:
The brevity of life makes art of us all.






At my desk the summers come and go,
Taking note of night’s fleeting glow.

The rhythm of words,
The steady rhythm, with no malice,
Beat upon a May morning,
Among the bulbs and hushed breeze,
Before the blossom, before the fall,
And that lone word: Brevity, Brevity, Brevity,
Bred its incessant hum,
Buried beneath my weary skull,
Stirred my slowing pulse,
And roused my dormant senses
To the guise of another spring.
I took her hand gently in mine,
We waltzed through the garden,
Through the tulips, of course,
The climbing thorns and vines
Of the foetal ruby children,
Traipsed delicately over the convulsing hose
Loosed upon the villagers of the green,
Danced to the music that filled our void,
And stopped short, breaking stride,
To embrace a bed of perennials:
“These cowards must go,”
Her words like a fog,
Targeted sparse, pillaging invaders,
As she knelt and plucked these rogue
Weeds from the earth, my earth.
Leaving only those of the hued,
She tossed the fallen aside,
The chaos of the indifferent stream
Took the victims, meandering
Through the garden and out,
Out into the field to vanish.
Dots of coriander,
Scattered through the tubers and stems,
Outlined the interlock brick walkway
Leading to a latticed archway engulfed
By the rotting fossil of forgotten hemlock
Wilting and surrendering to a new wind.





At my desk the summers come and go,
Taking note of night’s fleeting glow.

On these silent nights, I type,
Devoid of the ghosts of the damned,
I type, exhuming the words from
The ruins where my gallows once stood;
Enshrouded no longer by the shadows,
The rhythm of craven spectres,
I type liberty, to build, to craft
To invoke the gentle beast,
That serene world between sleep,
Between sleep and thought;
I type the thoughts of the young,
When they have shed the callousness
Of youth and rejected the monstrosity
Of the noose and all its children.
Awakened now, on the cusp of drowning,
The sea-weed reds, the sea-weed browns,
Hide beneath in their tomb of sky dust
And sink into their insidious intent.
As we walk across the water,
Speaking nothing of redemption, but growth:
The growth of the escape,
The first utterance of the mime,
The squeaks and murmurs of a voice,
A voice in a pitch, in a tone,
That the dead, buried and defeated,
Cannot, will not, hear.
I type the thoughts of the young
When the night is still
And the silence replaces
The desperate pleas of the damned;
And in that silence, in that silence
I understand the beauty, the truth, the urgency:
The brevity of life makes art of us all.

And now, on this silent winter morning,
I finish. It feels as though
I have been writing this poem for ten years.