Mortality

Ah — blight! This meaningless creeping before death;
Mere mumblings before the tomb. Avarice — I know it well.
Gripped briefly by pleasure, then shuttled off to sleep.
Hands like nails gripped around the doorway to the tomb.

If it weren’t for our entry, tumbling into the unknown,
Where we briefly fumble for lights —
What would we be but shapeless things, starlights;
Even less, intimations of black death?

Enclosed, but for speech, that toys with mute sensation like wolves.
Narrow corridor of the body; tincture of the mind that resolves.
What is genius but an eye above the lights, searchlight before the ground
Of this crawling beast of man?

We gaze before this tomb like an eyelet. Shuttled by the mad storm of time.
Planets whipped then calm by curiosity. And below, man is naught but a plaything
Of the depths of time; the gravity of immensities of fate.
We are knocked about, blustering, confused, then extinguished.

Is this nature? That these last words are never spoken
But combined with the furrow and the bush. That the epiphany
Is naught but quiet shrubbery in the alleys and bones of the dead?
I sit in the yard and comb the hair of the tombstone —
Wild, black rays, like tendrils that split the bleak red of the night.

This face: not fury, neither fear besides. This face,
Not a drought, but water undrinkable. The glade that flickers
Where light meets the shade of the depths and dissipates from view;
Scatters in penetration and pursuit.

Where shall we fly or climb, crawl about, or pronounce?
To this day, which is naught more than a beating of the heart,
A reaction to the hearth of greater forces —
Which spill into it, like molten lead or gold?

Even still, half dead. Uncarved and wild. Clay organs, clay lungs.
And a mind which surges far above and beneath the sunken face and hands which it contains.
Mortality —
This shattered hands and drum,
Beating back oblivion.