Ignis Fatuus

 Would I be taken to task

if I were to ask

if an arsonist would be shamed

by a candle's brief flame? 

In a roaring bonfire, 

what is another match?

The catch is that

the great act of 

self-sacrifice is the 

pyre of future action,

the dwindling of choices

to one final

kindling of despair, 

to fare with the struggle

no more.

I do not think this is what

the great gift of our lives 

was for. 

It is not complicity to merely breathe

in a world of ashes,

and although I may grieve 

(in my own way)

I would not make an ash of myself. 

Burn not without, but within,

with motive pure,

go on with your life and yet fight.

Endure. 

Broken in the Depths

 To break with

the rules and to use these

materials, 

despite all warning;

to reverse Noah, to

submerge and not to

float away from disaster,

but to view death as if

preserved in ice--

a specimen removed from the

current threat--

disrupted the pact between 

us and the deep. 

The intent to view death 

through a porthole,

fulfilled faster than eyeblink, 

as death rushed in, mercifully

faster than understanding could or 

last regrets.

We who lived with their

indeterminacy, 

the Schrodinger's sub, 

imagined horrors within horror 

worse than life itself.

The lungs of acid, brains of fire,

hallucinations of sirens,

Titanic ghosts,

kamis with mouths like lampreys,

shimmering things with seaweed

in their claws,

to depict an underworld with

laws not like ours.

We imagined last conversations

with one another and with a Maker

who understood and did not

forgive and doesn't,

silent as the water still and deep around them.

And yet the water came in

waves like blades in the pressurized depths,

crueler than any human cut-

cleaner overall. 

Tragedy holds no thrall for me,

I leave them here and for all time

the guests of the sea.

Neither deserving nor undeserving,

just unfortunate and fateful, 

unheeding of warnings,

the victims of the depths of curiosity

and the heights of hubris,

Icarus in his fall,

to something lower than the land

is all. 

Unknown

Will I see you again

anytime this side of the earth

if the frugal cosmos recycles

instead of dispatches 

souls to some other place

or, worse yet, disposes them?

Because I walk with

the unknown, alongside

the memories of those

I do not see

and while I know that they have ceased to be

they can not,

have not,

stopped being with me.

And what is left of them

and what is left of me, 

seem quantumly entangled,

and for the life of me,

I wonder about the life of you

having gone out to 

the unknown.

Hold Your Thoughts

Say no new prayers over me
while my brain pan cools
and that last synapse discovers
no relay and
my self slips into
nothing;
and hold your thoughts
like you might hold a call
while important business
was engaged in
and you were discovering
not mere words to say--but the right ones.

Stop time by ceasing motion:
no sudden tip of the hand of fate
be here, or now, but let
this blood spilled remind you
of where blood is supposed to be,
and let you know
once again, why it is wrong
to see it on the outside.

Don't cover my bled-out wounds
with bandages of words,
as if, mummified by rhetoric,
your thoughts and prayers
might raise the dead, and even better,
forestall your rush to defend
the bloodless weapon
that did my blood-soaked body in.

Give a little care for
the remnant of this
still-remembered ghost.
I was not your politics
and my still self should not
play its host. I was and then
not. But do not portray
me as victim to ideas--but know a person
unmade me.

And also unmade their self.

Eating Dust and Bone

Eating dust and bone
with  bled-out mouths
through tears too dry
to leave traces,
they were staring out
at a land called hope
with no hope left
on their faces.
When the danger fled,
danger still hung on,
the form of a brother
changed to a
treacherous friend--
the story so old
they could tell it to
themselves,
with an ending
that tastes of dust
and bone.

Ten long years back
they were brave and awake
that the danger faced
could be made erased.
But that treacherous friend
simply lay in wait
letting the danger come back
by looking away.
They were promised guns
and the fat of the land
and got decades of war
and the back of the hand,
Could one be sore?
No, it was written in stone
if only they ever read
they would see,
that promises made were ever
dust and bone
and all they ever could be.

But the promises made
that lead to lives far worse
should be understood as
evil as a magician's curse
and the echoes back
from where they began
should cause sleepless nights
for the certainly damned--
as they sit at great tables
in their stately homes
may they taste nothing
but dust and bone.

It is not yet an Elegy

It is not yet an elegy,
but I can feel the themes gather,
the muse calls, the baleful
light falls across the keys
of my instrument, and I type--
But it isn't yet an elegy.

You live, for one, and I can't,
for another, imagine you gone--
a reality that battles back the
themes of mortality,
skews the dying light
to cast about in a certain corner--

What did we call it?
Memory.

And that was mother of the thought
I had of you, being mortal,
and your mortality,
that it should not be rung as an elegy,
but tragedy,
tragedy--

that flesh is tragic,
that loss is tragic,
that we are all flawed like this, which is tragic,
and most tragic of all--
that something still within you stands
passionate, connected,
full of life--

and also full of dying.
Unthinkable. These two competing strains--
I dare not call it an elegy,
no. This dissonance haunts my
instrument, chastens me,
forbids me to wreathe you in
laurel or flowers, makes me honest--

but doesn't make me accept.
I have knowledge of what you are, alive.
I can not take knowledge of you finished,
yet.

~Jennifer Paviglianiti (12/6/2010)