How wild lavender, wide wild the fields between this moment and then.
How wild the glowing coals that wheel smoke against the window.
Here is where you find gravestones that were carved for unloved men.
Here is the gloom of hills and hollows.
My mind wanders through gusts and gallows without rest,
My throat keens with all the world’s sorrows.
My eyes tread up a tree and rest atop a blazing phoenix nest —
Instead of wings I find ghosts of old emperors that catch and press.
Then surged within me a grief for the death of martyrs and villains,
And the old world spoke to me in the language of beginnings.
Its words were dressed in winding-sheets and Shrouds of Turin,
But the words were the wings I’d sought, and gave me flight.
Those ciphers took me above the dark world of graves and aberration
— How the insomniac city took sleeping pills to quiet