Devouring Castle

I forage

Through the loneliness

Of your castle,

Where temperamental walls

Encircle me,

With a charge of witchy groans,

As stone and mortar

Crumble in a hobbled last stand.

Your ring of wasps

Stir a crazed strobe

Of cherry flame hurricane,

The bloodthirsty bounty,

A maddened strike

To barter for my unpeeled heart,

And hive rage

Her devouring cloud.

And the rummaged trove

Of cherub spangled charity,

Empties grief’s mist

Of smoke halo kisses,

Snaking through your fork tongued floors.

I find your bone framed picture,

Washed out by sun

And starved of doting eye,

Punishing the mirrored sentiment

Worn away in loveless erosion.

The mould and element throttled plastic skin,

An embarrassed coffin

In which the lingering incense

Threatens to take me captive

To the endless ballet

Of its perfumed tragedies.

And I sink at your harbour,

Through filmy shackles of fen,

Wingless and staid

Upon your hypnotic cradle,

Until I plunge back to life,

The baptism of shipwrecked funerals,

A seizure of thunder shuddered reckoning,

That sails hope’s shocked craft

Far from the blackened mounds

And gutted grounds

Of slaughtered memories.

Your grey sky kingdom topples into weeping ashes.