Mortality at Midnight

The soft complacency of incense singe,

Reeling through a head universe of amorphous starlight,

Breaking, bursting intellect,

Fragmentations falling like plates of armor,

Now I am free.

The memory comes like a biting edge,

Painfully precise, cutting in its clarity.

I see her now,

The wind-whipped statue on the hillock,

Her ruination saturating the circle of earth around her,

Contained only by weary iron fence posts.

I thought of stagnation as I sat in her presence,

Gazing out over the green vibrancy of Spring meadows.

The dead around us seem attentive,

As if the worn, cracking lips of the Queen were pursed

in contemplation.

I left shaken and sickened,

Wondering at my fascination with that timeless decay,

Wondering at my own morbid curiosity.

I started suddenly,

Fearing to find myself standing shadowed under the piercing incisors of mortality,

Only to find myself under the charity of quilted covers,

Surrounded by the soft complacency of the incense singe.