[Suzerain of Sheol]

Consolation and a Marble Lamb

I confess to a certain...
sympathy,
a spice of pity
coloring the feast of dispossession,
in all its amorous courses.

With arms bruised from the legion embrace,
with mouth worn raw by bloodless kisses,
I stagger in the multitude,
and even in this
I cannot but be more.

They are as trees in a colorless arbor,
stretching desperate roots
into an heliacal abyss,
a variegated ocean,
to its amorphous depths,

like vines,
raising a slow siege against
the trees of the world,
longing for the rapine of apples,
but denied even the dream of savor,

seeking, ever seeking
in the giving
another piece of the feast,
one more bite
from the assuring loaf.

And I feed them.
From my blood I give them water,
from my flesh, the salmon of a thousand lakes.
They think I do this in fraternity.
They think... my words are for their ears.

I stand among them,
wreathed in adulation
as the sun to winter roses,
and they do not wonder why.
They do not taste my words.

Here, beneath the judgment of the skies,
in open wonder to the skepticism of the horde,
I am draped with the mantle of starving love
and crowned in cavalcade
by oaths unto death.

But I cannot see them, only through them,
past the veils and sighs of praise.
When I raise my cup with theirs,
I swallow lead.
I realize...

that I am utterly alone.