The past is dead
A corpse cannibalized by the present
To be regurgitated in fear and greed
In endless justification and apologetics
Human agency and its offshoots
The years grind jumbled and broken
Regret, nostalgia, grief-at-nothing
Grief and sleep, combined, enchaining
Care itself, in its very essence,
Is permeated with nullity through and through.

As autumn deepens and darkens
I feel the pain of falling leaves
And the silence of short days
The deep oblivion of earth's lapse and renewal
The silence of infinitely open spaces
The wandering through endless nothingness
Careless years
Precious days
Oh, for any patent from oblivion
In preservations below the moon.

The spiders dead in their webs
The birds fallen from the sky
the monstrous putrescence,
physical and moral,
of everything in sight
Silver strips of bone
golden adipose tissue
Striated rubies of muscle now obsolete
The indignant refusal to countenance
That which is guaranteed
but now, upon receipt, cannot be believed.

Intrumental

Defeated by our own feebleness
Service and reward
Granting and forbidding
Frozen in matutinal light
When cold clear morning threatens
An ape in the graveyard
Free in the tearing wind
Without Eden's lurid walls.

The precincts of the city have rotted
The work of giants is rotting away
No coiled gold
Nor splendors of the earth
No ravening grey wolf
No sad-faced man tasked with burial
One easily divorces what was never united
Body from body
Particle from particle
The world falls apart into facts
Time fades away
Grown dark under the helm of night
As if it had never been.

It grows again
Faces in the windows
One window without light
Weeping
Alone
In black park of bed
Handing back the ticket
Shadow of death
I kissed his shadow.