In presumptions they lingered,
fingers tracing over skin and bones.
They were not true
moonlight branders and tradesmen,
they were talkers, stalkers, mockers, baulkers.

They laughed in insidious corners
where dark things planted seeds
and grew fervently towards ceiling tiles
touched by Michelangelo.

Unheard, they staggered through broken tombstones,
the soft cry
of sequestering old linens and the
electric burn of a love gone wrong.

Softness breathed into them,
performed greatnesses
to which their interiors were designed.

There was infinity in them, in a single
tear-stained, stitched up smile.

They were an always entity.

They bargained with Habeas Corpus
and made little sense
and appealed to the courtiers in medieval France.

They eclipsed a subtlety known to no one,
a piercing everywhere that crowded teeth,
and broke smiles,
and condemned innocent men
to die in front of their children.

And nothing stopped them,
and no one cared,
and everyone flipped up their newspapers
and swapped cigarette butts,
and made inquiries about weather
and who was at last night’s parties.

And with not a breath
and not a sound
and the inkling of laughter,
leaking through ceilings,
they all
fell
down.

Ashes, ashes.
They all
fell
down.