Morning After

The moon is cold and makes

its descent behind dull clouds,

fading at the sight of morning’s bright eye.

You burble in half-sleep.

Your opening words break over the air,

staccato crackling like some demented wireless,

Eyes dulled by the harsh blade

of morning, lips smacking.

Your vowels rise clean as souls.

The death’s head awakens itself within me

once again; bleats, bellows, stumbles

onward, cow-like and graceless.

The eye-shell counts everything seen
in the frosted apathy of a stone god.
Things may pass into being -or from it-

and still the shell face remains sand-dry,
and in the mind a fog thick as tar.
The house lies in silence.

In the air is the disquiet of our

bellowed words, bloody with

your frustration, shaken by my apathy

and all over, even in the dust,

there is death. Calling out

its lone song in the silence of our room,

a strange Love-song;

Prayer;

an Epitaph.

©Lorcan Black. August 7/8 2007.