Hell
Hell you know exists;
it is there inside your heart
when good your thought resists,
when you take the lesser part,
not blazing torment's flame,
not towering demonial hall,
just you in your little game
and a soul grown weak and small.
A fantasy whose only cost
is reluctance to emerge;
you dream, and your way is lost,
swept by unreasoned urge.
Each vice distorts your mind,
and curves your thought around
until only your thought you find
and your voice is the only sound,
each moment that you waste
in unrepenting play
solidifying taste,
deferring waking day.
You may set your nose on high,
you may at your betters snear,
you may tell yourself a lie,
you may babble hate and fear,
but the world will be dry-eyed,
for your fangs will be removed,
nor will your empty pride
one angel's wing have moved,
for though you weep and wail,
your con is clear to view:
the patter that you sell
the saints will know untrue,
the excuses that you make
the saints will set aside,
knowing that they are fake
and hollow through inside.
No triumph will you know.
The plan rolls ever on,
and all your flash and show
is nothing to the dawn,
for like the edge, a thin, faint line,
on a vasty tesseract,
is all that you call "mine",
your widthless little tract,
and you a good will serve
whose ways you do not see.
The treadmill of your curve
cannot hold infinity.
Hell you know can be;
you've but to look inside.
I find it, too, in me,
the empty scam of pride.
"Sicio"
Dry, and so dry,
with a chill in the sun
and a wind stripping bare
the moisture of life,
with a wrenching of nails,
with a drooping of head,
beyond what words can describe
on an unsuffering tongue,
but in a dry mouth
a bitter word of compassion
captures the truth,
the yearning to save others,
the aching of body,
and nothing to ease it
except vinegar and gall.
Shadow Realms
We are all in fact walking in the realm of the dead,
memories around us and ghosts in the head,
so many corpses beneath this endless dirt path,
so many saints saved and souls damned to wrath,
down in the cave where the shadow games are,
untouched by the rays of sun, moon, or star,
down in the underworld, shades of the real,
the fairies are hunting the children to steal,
and there do we walk, though we think that we breathe,
and ever around us the wraiths sigh and seethe.
What we call life is but life with the dead,
shadows around us and ghosts in the head.
