A Child of Two Worlds

The lantern-light of stars,
Limned by endless emptiness,
Holds cold promise.
My shadow-flickered fear of a disconnected fate 
pauses—
A song simmers in swimming nebulae,
Coalesces to cloud— a storm;
One hardly heard.
Snatches of ashes borne to orbit
An impossible earth;
My earth; born of magic—
A further pause—
The song fails—
I am displaced, 
And the heat of that sorrow 
would burn the heart out of any universe. 
It slips away—the endlessness—
And I am left without evidence—
That it was ever there at all. 

Two things I leave in my sleep;
The beautiful girl and the sword in the rock,
Its point buried deep,
On a desolate plain.
And the girl with the hair,
She’s unable to tame.
The kink and the curl and her ice-bright eye,
Bring a tear to mine.
Too lonely,
The sword is my obsidian soul,
A weapon of hate,
A crack in the hull.
It swallows the beauty.
She cries her hate,
But her visage is lost,
The moment I wake.

The iron-blood taste of fear;
Reminiscent of the cold-iron bite of slaughter.
The earth-memory of war that shrouds
The site of a battle lost to human memory. 
Even a paradise may live off 
The blood pooling beneath its roots.

Hollows beneath,
Lend a shivering instability to solid earth. 
The glimmer of calcium-dripped stone
Hides the violence of its birth.

Layers of emotion
Hide behind porcelain sculpted masks,
Grotesque in their perfection.
Emulating without the lit-spark 
In the chipped-ice eye,
The shadow-shattered warren of bitter soul.

Damn the limiting world,
Destructive Chaos inherited from a draconian figure
With flame-cracked scales;
He burned from within, 
Glowering his hate-gouged gaze.
Our bloody creation,
Brought about by our own invented animus.

A chink in the storm-dark wall of cloud,
As if a dimension of neon-fire lies beyond.
Glimpses into impossible futures,
Can drown the now in tear-blurred, impressionist
Brush-strokes of loneliness.
The death-silent soul roams a hill country
Canvassed by pewter-metal sky,
Tinged with the rust of disused light;
A mist-shrouded age hiding a forlorn landscape;
The remnants of a war, the War,
That covered the surface of an entire world.
Shields of cracked hide, dry as the finger-bones still grasping
The hilts of rough-hammered time-eaten copper blades.
The blood-stench died long ago,
But the scavenging, sickening hate remains,
Carving a place for itself in the hollows of an empty land.
It has no other home, this bruising anger.
The once-devoured takes shape,
Only to be devoured again and again;
And hope ever rises, to be slain
At the hands of such towering darkness,
Such endless pain.

With each morning, I am resurrected.
And as the flaring orange sun dips,
I begin again to wither.
And the hours stretch, like languid souls
Around the warmth that come night,
Shreds to bitter ash.

The path is splintered, leaking;
A damaged artery, imperfect images 
Filter through.
My sorrows are too vague.
The lashes are clipped, unable
To cleanse the film from my eyes.
And so they turn inward.

The vessel is too far gone,
Too shattered to mend. 
I’ve lost a day again. Dammit. 
Again. 
The shadow resolved itself;
I am going to die, it told me.
And what purpose, these seconds?