sleep comes for me on dark wings
faintly stirring this world-weary;
careful traces on stones at night
of a crisped autumn leaf crackle
dessicated and downtrodden
while in the skies above,
pulsars wink out
and the suns grow dim
empty empires long vacant
amplify, echo the hollowhaunt
these hollow broken—these hallowed halls
strains and swells the sweet-sorrowful,
soulless, unbodied, undying
i slept for four and twenty thousand years
when i awoke, the world
had turned to dust
when i awoke,
the world had loved and moved on
and all this time, the undying
these few bright points wavering
some distant seashore—
some quicksilver sea
time is an unruly tyrant
that every legacy is undone,
that every stronghold is torn asunder
here at the end: a horizon of
white ash and bone
and ice that sublimates
into vapour
and i am brought to the ground,
atrophied and anemic
my fragile body, skin and blood
and the anguish which passeth all understanding,
the keening cry of my innermost,
for all things lost—not things,
but souls and s