Ash

As the city girds itself
For the fires of April
And the riot heat of May,
I walk on crutches;
Pretend – legs;
Rasping breath,
My one propulsion.

Oblique dust motes
Tremble
In the web of light,
Heat
And crushed crystal.

Ramports and pyramids
Of dead cars are
Stacked high
As Belsen cadavers,

Or lined side by side
In friezes
Of obscene tortured metal,
Bending the wind.

This is the place
Where the light is buried.
This is the new necropolis
Of old forgotten Gods
And lost passions.

This is
The aftermath
Of the barricades
And the stifling
And the killing of the shout.

Now,
The night is somewhere else.

And the day has packed its lamps
And crept away
Towards its own local cemetery.

And here
Amid acres of corpse-scented rubble,
Dark, serpentine alleyways
And bleeding stones,
The city sprawls;
Nursing its hernias,
Licking its wounds.

Salt lick of wounds!
This is the weeping wall;
Scratched and bloody.

This is the terminus
For the cross.
And for the gnawing rat
To eat its way
Inside the brain.

The heat is psychopathic.
We lie close
As two faces of a knife.

And the river that rushes us
Neither feeds nor heals.
Our eyes are burnt cork
And sightless.

Among the shards
Of sourness and static
We slip
Several links
In the chain of being.
And we receive the legacy
Of the void
And the ash.

This is the dying season,
Petty and fettered;
Waiting for the sound of guns.
Where there is no argument.
No consensus.
Only the voice
Of the silence
Ending the dialogue.