Breaths of Immortality

Quem di diligunt, Adolescens moritur

 

Everything evaporates before the Fall.

Only with death can we feel the ancient longing to be free

And in my longing I recall

The lies that the false prophets promised me.

 

By the Spring

I have become invisible,

A formless shade wandering through indifferent streets,

Hollow shadow of waxwing slain,

Reduced by greatness and adversity to this:

The old man, old before his time, old in childhood and in youth,

A formless, peripatetic shade.

 

As the Summer dawns they glide past me,

Driven by Fates invisible as I,

Dreaming of their loves,

Of the shade of blooming trees

Of the serenity of urban parks,

Of the sun and the sand and their names in the sand,

Testaments to their divine mortality.

I dream of my dreams.

 

I am the lost name,

Shadow of waxwing slain

By the treachery of a fickle god.

I am Brutus in the Ides of Madness,

Slayer of Glory Incarnate,

Hopeless,

Cursed by fate,

Damned twenty-three times by the Prodigal Virgilian Sun who would not die.

I am a whisper to a dying god:

 

“Et tu, Brute?”

“Et tu…?”

 

They are the ones who live,

The ones who yet breathe toxic Life,

Poisoning themselves as they love

And revel in the evanescent joys of their fleeting love,

Fleeting as the maddened spring

And the wind that rustles the blades of grass and falling leaves,

Soaring the chosen to the scintillating apex of glory,

Before abandoning them to the earth,

Forgotten and Lost and Free.

 

And I am left watching for the advent of Winter,

Bringing snow at the heels of Death,

The Ultimate Creator.

Knowing all and knowing nothing,

Recognizing, Socratically, nothing but illusions,

Plagued by the seen unreal and the unseen real,

As I await immortality.

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