Elegy

Skies too dark to look upon whip wildly without wings, needlessly empty, soulfully damned. Moisture descends like a dove: Peace on earth, good will to him; he stands, slowly, softly, succinctly, no wasted motion; raises something to Heaven. Hands high as lightening, luminescent, languidly whirling, twisting, swirling. The atmosphere, pushed into a sphere too small, smashed flat, openly mocks the mourning mouths below. “Hallow!” it howls, twisting wrists and breaking bricks. Cries rise higher, ending nowhere, lost in the vapor like pulp in paper.

Streets bleed black, staining soles of the souls on top, while beneath its surface, corpses undiscovered rot covered in blacktop, not lost in cement; the mob might have given up when no foundation was found, “If it's underground, it's ok.” They remain decomposing, dense, detailed, empty eyes staring into solid stone, muscle atrophied in cast-iron casts, arms splayed in sordid summation: “This happened.”

He feels death is cliché, cold, calculating, predictable. He smiles with his hands, pushing, pulling, tossing dirt into the abyss. The blacktop walkway wanders round and round--blind, boldly blundering in an endless loop, “I am here, I am here, I am here.” And another shovelful falls, filling ravines and covering mountains, peaks freezing, wilting in the winter shower.

And is it too much? The soil sits silently in repose as the man walks away. Dust through art, to dust thou shalt return. Those who are burned return to ash, but all return one day to the earth, dwelling deep inside, sighing, “I was here, and now I am gone.”