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Failed Love As A Ghostly Tale; Unedited
Look at those sheer white stockings with a glare,
and say, flatly, that you refuse to wear
them although they are my own gift to you.
Say that I really ought to show I care
for more than my own pleasure, more than that.
Sit down upon the weathered, cold gray slab
where, in times past, joyous lovers sat
and use the words you calculate to stab
this ludicrous love of your presence out of me.
And as I lie, writhing, before your bare,
pallid feet, and provocatively bleed
in some fulfillment of your soul's worst need,
remind me, "This shall not inspire poetry."
The sunset's last light gleams like lavender
upon the soft, smooth strands of your long hair.
My thoughts drift as I lie, still twitching, there;
wondering, as life ebbs, how I could dare
to love you still. How much more could I endure?
But, haughty in your pride, you turn from the harm
done me and look away to Carolus Farm
on which your dead and deadening eyes prefer
(as out of some horrid vissage) to stare.
The ancestral home to your mother nd father
and siblings is ancient, but in disrepair
(for which none of them, nor you, want to bother).
They walk in shambling steps, but not alone.
Like Dante's damned, these cursing and cursed ones
were driven out in spiritual exclusion
by this land's early settlers, Puritans,
some hundred years before the Revolution.
Not too deep in that unholy ground, your kinfolk's portion,
rot the remnants of your monstrous abortion,
left in the soil without even a stone.
I almost want the undeath that you live.
To have it I almost beg with my gaze.
But you refuse to give.
You rely with supreme contempt
(from which no love of yours can ever be exempt),
"Nothing you could plead, or could have said,
"would suffice to please us, the real undead.
"So bleed out unto your last tortured breath,
"and take your place in soul-consuming death.
"When I have noticed that you are entirely dead,
"I will with my own hands tear out your heart
"(it is, of course, your emptiest part).
"To the dogs I will toss it, with your head."
In her glee, she might have spoken on and on,
but I was, by then, already gone . . . .
Starward
