frail

still the un-dark, the unearthly quiet this quiet beneath the earth, this hollow tomb seven thousand days and more (twenty times around the sun, invisible) whispered, withering a thread of dream-time, grey twining roots in the grave/rich soil of the world-between-worlds nurture and decay. endless still the unending, the ever-still tears to stone and salt—the weight of all time, and the weight of the world (every world waits: a hushed breath from one to the other, as if remembering the could-have-been; the shiver/thrill of hand-in-hand) a heart caves in upon itself an instant, or an eternity. time is/ still the unkept, the filled-with-

it was this final, fleeting thought: i am too old to die. i am an ancient shipwreck on the sea floor, an underwater pharoah. these, my hands—untimely knots clutching uselessly at memories                 see how i hopeless she is sleeping as she goes under/she slips without sound into the waves, dark clouds of blood-in-water. see how she sinks beneath the waves all those years + if i remember clearly                 (and i have no means of forgetting), the sea-father stood there like a pillar of salt on the shore as i arrived, un-drowned having breathed for days in the deep. having walked all those miles: footsteps in the silt,

sleep comes for me on dark wings faintly stirring this world-weary; careful traces on stones at night of a crisped autumn leaf crackle dessicated and downtrodden while in the skies above, pulsars wink out                    and the suns grow dim empty empires long vacant amplify, echo the hollowhaunt these hollow broken—these hallowed halls strains and swells the sweet-sorrowful,                    soulless, unbodied, undying                              

i slept for four and twenty thousand years when i awoke, the world had turned to dust when i awoke, the world had loved and moved on and all this time, the undying these few bright points wavering some distant seashore— some quicksilver sea time is an unruly tyrant that every legacy is undone, that every stronghold is torn asunder here at the end: a horizon of white ash and bone and ice that sublimates into vapour and i am brought to the ground, atrophied and anemic my fragile body, skin and blood and the anguish which passeth all understanding, the keening cry of my innermost, for all things lost—not things, but souls and s

to the angel of fallen winds, sovereign of the house of deneb: for all the undying intake of breath for the delicate ruin of epochs over the slow stretch of time, aed eidon— the loss was absolute forgive me those trespasses, ancient forgive me for having simply wept, facedown in echoed times and echoed spaces in deepnight when (between the stars) our bodies would freeze and fall as snow of the annunaki shiver-form at heaven's gates; the doors of aidon and we wait for that holy light to warm our sails here you find me, ice and blood and the sleeping strings of potential energy ice and cold rain. heavenly god, i have waite