The beauty of this red and bloody sunrise

That, scarlet, creeps up the morning London skies

One sits naive in still and silent thanksgiving

To see this scorching star tear open a cold, damp day

In such a fiery and momentous way

But this light filters pale through death

A bleeding from the golden clouds that portend

Not a glorious and beautiful beginning

But a brazen, wood-burnt symbol of our howling bitter end.

I feel her smiling

Across the endless ocean

And this is my peace

Who walks alone

As night descends

Here in the village

Of stone and of bone?

Who spends time

Amongst the broken teeth

Here white, here black

Jutting piecemeal and loose

From earth’s tenuous hold?

I do. I step bold

In the wild, overgrown warmth

Above the buried, above the cold;

A stranger

Amongst the dispossessed

Just me

And brethren homeless

Who make camp

In the darker places

Comfortable with the dead

In whom they share so much

As they lay

Mouths pressed to the listening earth

whispering secrets to one-another

In the safe and falling dark

I carved out

Pieces of myself

Small and private,

That I consumed

In the silence

Of my own slow decay

That I might keep

A bit of mortality

Away, away, away

But still it came;

And so I purposed

To give these bits

To my heart-song’s love

As she has given me hers

And we might know one-another

As has been written of

In the greater tales

Worth remembering