Epitaph

Let the screens go black and cold, and the fizz-pop-hum fade. Let the grass grow green again over the asphalt earth, painting fresh the boldness of life. The tree at the top of town whispers the secrets of a thousand years in tongues of creaking, psithurism, scarred bark skin tattooed by lovers fallen out of it in the dripping ink of void. It knows the darkness of our hearts, the ceaseless march of our boundless need for more. Blood. The one, the two, the few too many who have childlike swung there at the end of their own tether or the cruel vines of hate embraced at the last only in the wind’s ephemeral arms and gravity’s indifferential magnetism. Let the screens go black and cold, and the fizz-pop-hum fade. Let the torches extinguish their enmity, the brambles untangle from their gnarled snarling to open wide the gates of time. The soft skin hardened by labours unwished for stroke the hand of a loved one departing, for an hour, a day, the remains of what’s somehow still called a lifetime though what little life it has left ducks in and out of shadows in the waning crepuscular flickers of torchlight out the window near the top of town where a tree whispers the secrets of a thousand years in tongues of creaking, psithurism. Let the screens go black and cold, and the fizz-pop-hum fade. Hearts beat back the darkness left by those who did, we were, and the light that burned, painting fresh the boldness of life in the likeness of you.