chateau

legions … of shadowed purpose they rattle the parapets of my flesh morning paints the stark reality that lays like shards of tea-stained saucers before me … an iniquitous army of intent poised to scale the ramparts of all I’ve bargained and built those sordid soldiers hold no deference for me there is no honor in the garlands they drape upon this aged castle, only thorns of a sinister, vile vine that wrap and wring me like the fingers of a god without its heaven … or its hell … pray - how should I lend charity to this day? what compromise awaits? I pluck pixies of pure shimmer from the swaying, salted sea-tops then cast them to my dungeons like feed flung to fowl … perhaps they’ll burgeon there and I’ll use their bright to decorate the walls - garish graffiti to greet the ghosts - an epitaph for the best of my epic epigrams … I pine still for the latent lass that met my passions amidst these dunes that seared my soul with her eyes late-day sun melting within - my hands reading her body like Braille oh the poetry written there … she was the moat, you see - the beautied barrier around my dreams we built this citadel together raised its bulwarks here dune grass, the only witness to the bittersweet love made but for one Burberry plaid blanket laid out on the sand that eager haste, our sole foundation and the crumbled promises and vows I now see scattered about me the lonely, aching ruins of a fortress … fallen.