What Lies Beneath

What lies beneath the nuptial necropolis? Sun-glints of memory, warm rays of kinder days, tranquil as the soil-sleepers before they broke the coffin confines and howled free. What lies beneath the crying cairns? The pearling bones, bone-pearls of scattered skulls and souls. Draughts of the dead sculling frothing tides of Queen Anne's lace - tomb festoons of bridal lace, undulating umbels purling the marriage mausoleum. Beneath the wedding whiteout I thought was daylight, into the nightlight where we stumbled like sleepwalkers. And here rattled the homing bones, the family ivory; we could hear their unrest, scraping at loam. What lies beneath the soil clots that coffin-clattered like stones? Your father - black-rotten in his coffin. Borstal bastard knife slicing his sister's fingers; her blood a rushing ruby stream, her pain a scarlet scream. What lies beneath the old corpse copse, the sentient sentinel trees? Roots driving deep, roots of you; yew roots sprawling to clacking skeletal maws, to tangle and twine strangling the choke-ivy shrine. Taproots creeping through terra, groping for the black growth of father terror; the bone-burrow death that puppeted him puppeting you; now you lie with his voice, your eyes a green glaze he gazes through. Root-threads that wove and wed us, their tumorous tubers riddling the rancid soil where souls lie soiled and ache blue-bloat bruises - contusions of the broken child who lies in confusion beneath the facade of indifference, the dark father fist.