Member Poem

Though dead snakes poses venom still,

Thy shriven hide is fangless.

Thy absent eyes are blind,

Thy sunken chest is breathless.

The petrified lips, where once the Queen of beauty kissed,

Are voiceless, moveless and dead.

No edict shall pass from them,

No archaic sonnet your eyes beheld by some desiccated sun

Will ever be freed from the dust of what was left when Life was done.

Death, rendered the heretic mute by force

And does what priests could not:

Sent him to his god and, briefly,

Made him a man that time forgot.

Now we remember thee.

Heretic king! First of us who sought to be free,

First to stand against ancient ones

And produce a singular god we mistook as the sun.

The catalyst from whence we’re born,

The shadow in which our faces form,

The first of these was yours to conceive.

The notion of individuality:

Accredited first to the heretic king.

Hence let his death bell ring!

And ring on ‘til the last separable shadow falls,

‘Til the thought of “I” sickens us,

‘Til the death of soul and mind

Is abided by the core of human kind.

Only then shall our mourning cease,

For then we’re shades that cannot grieve.

‘Til then: Qui Vive.

Addendum: 

Millennia afore our flags were flown

Before the shape of our nations drawn,

When the sands were hot beneath a noonday sun,

You watched a crippled child that would never run,

Was it then you knew: That in death your mutiny

Would fall beneath the claws of antiquity.

As a nomad to a sphinx who asked a verse

To which the only answer was death or curse. 

Bewildered King, the Romantic’s fate,

To tempt the gods and defy hell’s gate

Death is great, though greater still,

The strength of legend gives birth to will.