Saturday, August 05, 2006

#104: August 5, 2006

The shadows in the corner of the room
are whispering tonight. The cold hearth flames
turn walls to water; from that fog-thick gloom
the dead advance and rise, calling their names.

The old inn, empty as cicadas' molt
but for this tired old man, cannot be said
to breathe as some homes do. Behind the bolt
it is, like most its custom, cold and dead.

All through the night the phantoms tell of want
left from their castoff lives, but never lost.
There's nothing to disturb me in such moan.
For if I'm haunted here, I also haunt:
a live man in a dead world is a ghost,
and no one in the graveyard is alone.

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