When I was a kid, I looked up to you Your beautiful words, I believed they were true You'd been through Hell But you came back again Even that couldn't kill you, You would always remain Where have you gone? What happened to you That changed who you were, That killed who I knew? Is this who you were Underneath all the lies, Was it just an illusion I saw in your eyes? But eternity's passed In the blink of an eye You've thrown away everything For a disparaged sigh You were once made of iron, So certain and right But everything you were Fell apart in the night. - The soul never dies, It will always remain, But your mind has been taken; I've been wishing in vain When I got older You just walked away You forgot what you stood for, You took the easier way Where have you gone? What happened to you That changed who you were, That killed who I knew? Is this who you were Underneath all the lies, Was it just an illusion I saw in your eyes? Where is the fire That used to be there? That shined from your soul And the beauty you shared? You're dead inside, but You don't even care, You buried the cross You tried so hard to bear.

Eliot was right, The truth is so much simpler: "This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang, but a whimper." We died for what we thought was right It had to be this way, a mirage From Death's Other Kingdom recedes As our work, this progress slips away. The earth is underneath me, The sky is grey above. My thoughts wander back again To days of peace and love. Days of peace and love we see A whole eternity; A garden green with seed, Unfertilized delight. The shadow's fallen softly Between the shades of grey. Between the night when plans are made And the breaking of the day. Here the day refuses to freeze... Our time was short but now Our nights do not cease. Time is running out, now Through the turning of the earth. With the summation of all it is And everything it's worth. It's worth is everything: The life we leave, That darkness We bequeath to you. It's ashes that mark our end, With thoughts of what could be. The greats who went before us And the ambitions that were key. The keystone of necessity We did not yet relieve From your responsibility. They moved and shaped the world With fire in their breast, They gave their lives in the last great war And soon the world will rest. The resting world Will proffer men akin to us And you will send them To die again. The fire's gone the ambitions dead As those who went before; With mud and blood and trench and steel Our race will do no more. We died for what we knew was right It had to be this way... From Death's Other Kingdom we watch As our work slips away... Eliot was right, The truth is so much simpler: "This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang, but a whimper."

Early spring of `35, Late in the afternoon... The devil had his way A spectre eighteen years, An adolescent restrained: The barren soil of today Flooded into our homes and lungs, It's petulance ingrained And when we saw The cattle again we then Saw our own tombstone in bone. - So when death Finally sought us out It's face was ambiguous and strained If it does rain... If it does not rain? Next-year people so simple, so fain Homes lost, A generation lost only decades before: A human impasse of pain Rain follows the plow, The plow follows war Nature begets, resets the score. - We subsisted the Dirty Thirties... We cast our lot, roaring "Twenties!" We tilled graves For men and buffalo grasses In the horrid Great War.

1 The skies are blue and the mountains red Though forested green to that apex seen When witnessed from the omniscient above Are snow-laden aeries of reverie, Our ghosts possess a fleshy routine Whilst nightly perusing a godly painting Subconscious meandering In the depths of mostly forgotten dreams - We find ourselves fully wrought of The hedonistic concerts we can't play To the audiences of the day The midnight sun does give us full reign So with the aspect of soliloquy We aspire to find within our true selves A place where I can be me and You can be thee with impunity - Life breeds death and death breathes life But a swaddling somnolence Incorporates the stormy intricacies That we refuse to see in our daily Haranguing partook from inadequacy So in essence then, who are we? An animal with no sense of control Or a person bereft of mind thus soul? - Ask your devil what makes them 'twain Naught but the black in you can strive And make right an effort to understand But in the pits of Angband we all find What evinces the spirit of man And when I sleep seeing those iron walls Fade into such a mythical sense, Finding beauty in the fog of my subconscious 2 Cleaving betwixt the day and the night Despite their relative position in my sky Fulfilling the wanton mind And it's desire for infinite flight Piercing the dawn of banality, Giving credence to an immortality, Logically we can only believe in with our most Erroneous of self-deceptions - With the rhythm of morning rain We are corralled into the mundane Shivering in blizzard winds of the "sane," The very same who cast us out And without recourse call us to task For not identifying with their personally- restricted definitions of being, Their white-flag to constricted hearsay - Your daily lives are suicide dreams You do peruse, yet attempt to consign To the dominion of nightmare A cage where you can contain the horror Seen as a pet of communal need, As a beast for those who desire rotten meat But the nightly hunt for us Is a glorious, unrestrained and massive feast - Where we dine on infinity, Intellectual love and the finest things Golden sleep and divine repast, A mental lecture on which vultures prove to deign Their pecking making us appear insane The Tree of Woe we find ourselves nailed to Aghast, hung abreast are us, Well-wishing ourselves far outcast from you 3 Defiance for us doth the pillow bring An existential format for those who do dream Of a laughter, beauty and concerns beyond The concentric rat-trap we alone can not solve Away from those who choose a consistent Devolution towards dichotomy As an island pervasive with idleness, A tomb below those who pursue godliness - Thus without you I can't see me There is no reflection whatever to be Gleaned in the discourse of waking life And the shoulders of my being do cave Under the weight of isolation And the discrimination of antithetic Dissonance in who I even am at all Someone that seeks the blue differential - Never had Faith to give me the strength So only on the altar of myself can I pray In adopting those mental conspiracies To fruition, do I beg of myself; But who are you, I do ask of the one Being that does speak of these stark things Can you with volition bring A revelation naught else hath seen?! - Will I die in wanton sleep? Accursed, deafening lusts beckoning? From beyond a border of maternal cares, Arguable mistrust and blatant disgust? A near generation of who I have come to bear, A harbinger of naught but despair Harboring illegitimate concerns For the ones claiming to actually love us? 4 As time's arc proceeds to crest We notice and witness recursive Elegy that sparks you to bleed Emotionally, but only in context And with full resolve of the aspect Pertaining to their preferential godsend, Thus can we grieve loss of it's beauty And the damage done philosophically - Obscured by the light of the gods Hidden within our own malcontent stature, A sovereign nation formed from the fracture The volcanic, tectonic faults we all do have Between us and the waking world Explosively denying our reality And with emotions cooled in the night Are us fossilized in reds of brevity - Eschewing explicit simplicity I find in death a prime proponent Hiding with me beneath the mask and Dare I ask where does my life start? Does it begin when indulging the moment? Does it begin when you sculpt a future? Does it relent when our soul is railed? When the visage slips, am I a true failure? 5 I'd rather die in infamy, In grave with love and benighted below Having been given my chance to ignite Burning a swath of integrity Across the night of disparity The stars as my only consistent witness Having given my whole conscious to truth, Than share any of these words with you - Liebling, with her face pressed to mine, I see the eternity dreams have devised With your face pressed to mine, Witnessing lore my rhymes hath disguised Darling, your face pressed into mine, Retreating from the concurrent malign I am finding reams of unclouded skies Above Arda, "forever" defined - My love, your face pressed to mine I still see the flash in your eye Your cold face pressed into mine I see the flash in your eye, my love Your face pressed into mine I still see that flash in your eye I see that flash in your eye I see a flash in your eye I see a violet flash.