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Oh, this impish ill!
this mystic flock of ever-roaming pain;
You now possess fully
my body and my life.
I am at your full attention and mercy;
Do you not rejoice?
Are you not overwhelmingly triumphant?
This very body that shamed kings into beggars,
that made cowards into martyrs,
songs to motivation,
and indisputable chaos to nation;
All of my great works till now
are devoured by this deplorable disease!
Indeed, now all are indifferent to my successes,
to my brilliance and my legendary valiance;
You see no more but a breakable man-
Another mortal undeniably, indefinably, irrevocably….dying
 
This misshapen swarm inside distorts my frame;
These bones weaken as I lay
isolated in the mist below the disparaging judges—
Away from the ordinary who spat on me in revulsion;
The known healthy and the blessed—
The cursed clean!
Even relieving the dogs and the fiends from this stinking burden I am
but a rogue omen, and a threat
to their meaningless power.
 
My skin is paling, flaking—I feel it!
Though dread long has fled to sorrier lands,
seeping in the heavenly regions of trembling angels,
crying out to me to submit, and repent
to a god who has enslaved us—
To—in the end—die,
and for the bravest, and the best,
perish harshly and horribly!
 
Agony places itself in all that cries out in me—
tired agony mixed with the sting of venomous words;
My family—additions to the cursed clean—
They visited me once in prison;
My father, rigid, alien to me,
Colder than the prison walls surrounding,
and—of course—unwilling to be written upon,
stood silent, as my mother wept,
as my brother, his son whom he loves,
stared through me hollowly, dumbly,
possessing traits too doleful to acknowledge,
yet always, he is
more than anything I die to achieve.
 
Dead flowers crumble in my palms;
Now their known beauty is long gone.
I had been ailing, though enduring,
spreading and killing off fellow prisoners one by one;
The jailer became furious with the disease,
his dying wish to have me alone with the ground and worm;
His death and his bitter will against me touched the queen,
Who deemed the clean oppressed.
The solemn king whom I had served once with reverence
so soon sentenced me prematurely to this tomb,
to enclose a black hell of chilling cold around me,
and—as was ordinary—granted me
no walls to write on.
 
Tears fall…
I have learned in the silence even fury sighs and dims
 
Pacing and pacing,
I was soon reduced to feverish quaking,
and in every sense aching,
till the floor met my lips,
as the weakness took a fragile but substantial grip on my hope;
That moment, I begged this tomb to take me.
 
As fate has seen fit,
this is my dirge of a conclusion:
 
We all—cursed man—
All—ordinary and brilliant alike,
meet the same filthy fate
involving unassuming worms and dirt-
senseless deafness, blindness and darkness.
If I ever bloomed,
in your eyes, my father,
like your sons before me, I bloomed for naught,
only to, like infants, cry-
to die
and rot. 

For Justin Bordner's "A Tomb of Ancient Bloom" contest
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