Two Tongues: A Dirge in Duet

Sat with the asphalt phantoms
by their cobblestone grave sites,
and sang with them a melody fit
for a necropolis.

It strung itself in shadows,
those silent waxing mourners
so heavy with dust and grief,
slunk rat-like through the gaping mouths
and jagged eyes of fallen giants.

We danced up alleys and down side streets,
we gathered up their misplaced pity
and put it in a vase,
arranged the battered petals
into a monument of melancholy.

We dismantled the doors,
let stand naked the desperate fear
of new beginnings. Paint chips
broke away like comets,
like hearts, like fish bones
sinking deep into a dream.

Every wounded window
an artery, torn open,
by broken glass promises...

each disjointed doorway
a burial mound
where beauty is interred.

As our elegy swaggered
through mausoleums and tombs
we laughed at the gathering tourists,
when they whispered words like
"coincidence" - that our downtown
colour scheme could match a cemetery.
But now the noonday bricks
have heated and boiled the humour
into a vaporous existence...
and no coagulated passion
could ever come bubbling down the boulevard.

Smooth-faced Thanatos
lifted his head, plucked notes
from their crawling paths
and then consumed them,
saying, "I am the end
to all means, but means
are fire-feathered creatures,
and ends too can end."

The dust and the dirt,
that swirled on the sidewalk
were the same dull brown
as the starving grass.
Here, an island nation,
exporting massive quantities
of the past.

Rust unhinged its jaw and
slithered up handrails,
hissed new creation stories
to weed-invaded cracks,
fiercely clinging in the way
of things that know no better.

Gods scrawled goodbyes
on moldering brick, breathed life
into their epitaphs and watched them
scamper away into corners,
find their own tails and
bite down hard.

Wretched puling beasts,
they tore themselves apart
and then died with a low,
broken whimper.