An empty gathering
of clerics, pagans, Louisiana voodoo-men a communal fire that emits no heat,
a chanting, something holding its own life in phantom hands;
we are gathered
in a gossamer soul like thieves,
hoping to gain a thing that was always foreign to us: raiders, pillagers of time,
we take
until there is nothing left to give
emotional tyrants,
kings of no land—
heretics,
of no religion,
the disembodied flock to us
as moths to flames,
they join in our evolutionary dance
of bending, of bones breaking
until they leave no more than a shadow’s echo on the earth a place scorned by their undertow,
soft grass turned ash.