[Suzerain of Sheol]

Emptiness, be thou my God

This is how it is
to breathe winter,
to capture the last of those warm dusks
in an inescapable sigh.
An endless letting-go.

And the aurora is so cold,
describing the name
of this inanimate sky
as I sit among a trifling solace,
a rare, pristine devastation
and contemplate art,
my only company that
distant eagle's cry
and the patient seduction of the water.

But ever to return to the waking,
the dismal structures
of this material cosmos –
bastion of all my weariness,
the perpetual beckon
to the imprisonment of a heart.

Here, the hostel of dimming days,
this asylum of my disrepair,
my still-life,
filled with the unfailing echo
of those stifling breaths,
of self-destroying honesty

and damnation in dreams.