Death’s Tongue
When you come to me,
come thrashing.
Use what remains of your resources;
your warrior species
has always been one to squander.
Smash your bottles
filled with saints.
Reach, for your philosopher’s pillars.
Hurl dice at my eyes.
Cling to the potency of your dead language,
claw, reaching for the crumbling walls
in Latin tenements. You forget
that I am the one who’s fluent.
Kick the cosmic womb
when you feel time contracting,
the air losing its consistency
as it moves in and out
of your lungs. As the tugging starts
on your heels,
flail, knock over the furniture inside you.
Never mind that my feet are bloody
and I’ve spent an eternity
looking for a place to sit. I stand
as a vessel
between two worlds; in the moment you die
the meanings of your beings are left
etched on my bones, tiny universes
translated there, carved
in the infinitesimal space
between the two instants over which you
switch off
like a streetlamp
in the face of dawn.
But like the moon, you only knew who I was
because Life was off burning something.
Yes, Life! That gluttonous combustion,
that wretched carnivore Life.
All you cared about was Life,
while I had to hide my face
in a vain attempt
to make myself look like Him
or at least reflect as his opposite,
his other side.
I took this job because I believed in balance.
But where is the balance, the fairness
in existing only to take,
and never to have? I am supposed to
swallow generations and ruin continents,
I am not allowed
to appreciate you the way
you welcome a child into your arms.
Even though I spend a lifetime
inside you, trying to teach you
to crave what is outside,
the only time I actually exist
is in that one moment, that instantaneous void
which occurs merely as a technicality.
The scythe
is ornamental;
it’s just something to hold
that doesn’t wither.
On that day you find yourself in my reach,
let my touch
spark one last fire inside you.
When your body falls apart in my hands
shout animal enough for the soul
to erupt from your mouth.
Let Him tremble with the sound.
There are stronger things inside you
than Life. I have seen them.
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