For if the wages of sin is death,
Or my soul is sick to death,
And the blanket memories are wrong,
Then all the souls departed -
The dearly loved, the memories -
And through the mist is parting,
You lean like heads on sticks,
And anchor you in memory.
The death of our saviour,
A time to rejoice, to lift our arms in hallelujahs,
The dust of my wake softens a mountainside
If implicated, stretched clean, complicated by rumour.
Approach to the burial ground
Blown across by paper scraps, ash.
Struggling by the sluggish stream,
Failing to pull its pages
From the thick curdled waters:
The death of an empty tome -
The sentence ends and corrupts the page.
Disrupted. Home takes you away from me
To only remain in unmarked slates or
On unwashed stones in catacombs,
And there too lies my desire, close to you,
To the nearly blue, to the bludgeoned departed,
And in the lean-to, filed away, back in memory.