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The Asking Man
Man must ask what mask he carries,
and for what dream of woman tarries,
what hopes for harm he holds at heart
or hurt of heart when held apart
from love, from life, from burdens lost,
from morrowwinds and sorrow's costs,
or whether man be grasping gain
for such giving pain of men he's slain, or
be he tending wicked wounds
prostrate and wombed 'fore Christian moons.
What makes him man is what he asks,
what next, what now, how hard's his tasks;
we ask our worth and worth of words,
and how, through man's harsh world, they ford,
to lead us from the sins developed
around the meek, in fears enveloped,
until his voice has strewn astray
by age or hate; it's thrown away.
Afar, he watches the world's disputes,
this dying man, this weak and jealous mute.
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The Iron Rib
I found an iron rib
within a wooden tomb,
and took it with a tallow wick
to burn within my papered room.
I sang to it my song,
the secret one I grew,
but never could a voice or tune
bestir its enigmatic mood.
I took it to my garden
to churn the sodden loam,
when suddenly it beckoned me
to bury her deep in my home.
I placed her in a case
and hung a lamp instead,
but in that night my dreams were drowned---
I heard the glass break from my bed.
I charged her with a torch
to burn her before day,
but it had quite escaped by then,
her only trace a skull of clay.
I asked her with a scream
what was this skull to mean---
the hollow chill that answered me
still haunts me, taunts me, in my drowning dreams.
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In Memoriam
A night awash in tears of storm
I sat beside your grave, forlorn.
The creak of coffin hinges pulled
could not awake my sorrow fooled,
and there lay in sultry half-light bare,
your paleness that all sun forbears.
I touched your bosom, raw and torn,
and thought of endless eves I've mourned
with sickening shudders in my heart
and twisted thoughts that would not part…
A finger on your clit, malformed
your body (yet was there warmth?!?)
I plunged myself, prostrate embrace,
but any soul had left no trace
of intimates and empathy-
to me, lovelorn antiquities
I yet clutched dear to memory…
…oh unrequited fires of need!
I thrust my hands into her chest
in search of hope within her breast,
but drew I none but ink of death
from where your broken, fettered breath
once sung of tender silly lies
I swear could still be heard inside.
That blood-bound corpse before my claws
to which I burst with hellish calls-
"O Dani, where and wherefore hide
from somber soul here lost beside?!?!?!"
I turned my cry to deathly sky,
the scream of man, of muse, deprived.
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Abattoir Rituals
Achtung in the dungeon, son.
It’s time: you must divorce the sun
and gurgle with us zombies. See it
as olms in a sunken oobliette.
Your comfort bores into the wood
to leave you stranded in its blood
and sheds its silky skin of sin---
yes, your plumpness is a Stygian sin.
Come and feast on pulp and spoor
with we who lick the castle floor
for dust, and shit, and steaming drool---
our craven rations of gut-stewed gruel.
We wraiths wax hungry whilst our haunt,
eternally divinely gaunt,
so fattened angels we cultivate
in hopes we quickly satiate
such necrophagic phillia---
“I loved you once, Aurelia...”
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The Ravenous Secret
a single candle’s naked flame,
smiling with regrets,
though wax and wind it steals at night,
seeks flesh, and thus covets.
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Shiniai
joy is fine for friendly guns
and death is just as fun,
but with advents of the prophets
are arrivals cruel and frayed
as people cry and people sing
the weather’s élan alights
but cross a soul’s bestial dew
and bells will toll like crows in pew
never was there sullen doubt
that icons duel in foolish bouts
pick a name, pick a saint,
pick faint runes of tired fame
if ever ghosts were hard at heart
their tombs too cold and stained
let the epitaphs be wrought
of skin as well as pain.
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Discomfort
Standing sands
with glass demons lurking
spackling cracked gargoyles
and hard-tech limestone golems
Gremlins worm through
gyrojets and aeroscopes
like mechanics with herpes
Never sicker was a sick leper
Death’s scythe’s thick
as if it had fed on raucous eggs
before the crusty lips
snapped like bruised sinew.
Clacking oobliettes ooze their gnarls.
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Empty Scabbard
Misery’s cords of mottled maudlin craze
do slowly gut the headless man
and stab his heart with stabs of icy steel
as he fumbles to handle its broken blade
so notched with diseased darkness.
His stake lost, there is no other defense,
he draws upon one last aegis,
but still his stratagems are foiled,
his ancient arms are weary and soiled,
and his long sordid passage’s sheath is
hammered away as an angel’s weak brow.
Who can forge a deeper spirit out of
ironic iron and the tears of Damascus
than the smith of demon flames that
presses, with a heliocentric hand,
the brittle metal of a mishapen mind?
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