Semahs

I once again put pen to paper and

shout across that dark middle-distance which

I fear no longer.

The house is tidy most days and

errant fingertips trace for

dust that isn’t there.

They still build castles with our misery but

with faultier foundations now.

Once, a summer when I burned and broiled and

wished to trade places with

every scattered tuft of

roadkill fur.

But the winter came and

swept me out

beneath wandering blackholes.

I begged them to take me on their way.

Did the wind call you when I jumped?

I thought it might,

if I wished enough. But

the stars I wished upon

wore death-masked frowns and

died before the Pleistocene.

The light we saw from them was

cold as the blizzard I was born in.

When once, twice, thrice,

I sung the dreary dirges and

danced the Semahs

in ivy-pillared courtyards,

I thought you would hear me.

Hear me and return before

the rituals turned to ravings and

the songs became screeching.

Drums of war pounded and

ashes ate my airways, yet,

I held my broken scimitar aloft and

felt the Richters of ten thousand horses

stampeding towards me.

Would I were as steadfast as thou art,

for the salvo painted the grass

a sickly, sickening, scarab-eaten stain.

Still, I waited at the water’s edge.

Depths and denizens dragged at

my skirts and hair and then

I waded deeper,

drunk with drowning and

drowning in drink.

And was revived against my will on

that frigid morning's shore.

The noise in my mind protects me from

the only thing I still fear,

that hungry titan threatening

to swallow me like

one of his unfortunate offspring or

crush me under a trillion stones and

I would scream “More weight!” to avoid

the return of my immortal enemy:

Silence.