SLEEP

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
                                                           one

i know who i am: king of ghosts
a pale monarch, kingdom in ruin—
this grey thorn-garden, mnemonic realm
of synapses misfired/misformed
these resonant echoes, a shockwave sundering
sky-cracked ages of hurt and memory
stretched into spacetime lattices, superpositional
where scar-tissue constellations
lace the night in cosmic filaments:
                   a universe of pain
                   since time immemorial

proceeding from the bruised heavens
i am brought low again to the ground:
archon, luminary, saint-to-soil

i have become so tired/i have become sleep
this shallowbreath and last few steps
a hushed wasteland of stone and dust
whisper-walking past the white ancient tree
whose withering thirsty roots
spidersilk through dry earth, arms outstretched
like bones lifted to the night.
                   look up, it is finished—
                   every star has fallen




with all else quiet,
i lie down to the true sleep
from which there is no waking