Fallen

Empty doorways, specialists in matt darkness, never punctured
by a flickering point of light.

Hinges hang forlorn, long-abandoned and bereft of hope.

I’d rather spend a moment in your lightning shadow
than a lifetime lived without it.

Staggering on a path that picks its way through rusting
cables crumbling at the quay

Wearing nothing but the stains of all these words on which I choke.

Sorrow, veiled like empty vestments on a hanging-tree cannot
detain me.

Nothing I can muster will amount to more than flaccid skin,
as worms embarrassed by the morning rain.

Blanched by washed-out sun, holy, ineffectual, to
die beneath a sky that once believed it had the best of life.

Outlawed.

Nothing left but sound.

And the clipped precision of the clock.