The Death of One Who Never Was

He or sometimes She
would never feel the salt but still we mourn
as if She or sometimes He
had lived a thousand lives.

All pains lie with Him
or Her,
the bullets and heartache,
ills and poisoned luck.

So here's to you
as tongueless hoardes come mute
to sail heavy, sometimes awkward glances
over thy dark frame in sandy, morphine jaws.
Eyes closed yet alive to clocks
and inches,
rolling to tea and shop fronts
where memoirs dragged by chariots of ages
come to fall under sleepy overtures
and choirs of death.

You,
the friend to skulls
lover of gin gallows and looking to the blind,
you come to a hundred deaths.

@Steven Francis poems 2014

How Rest, Modern Dead

In mortal cradles
bodies do they sleep,
bombed to tears,
in earthly threads.
A bitter walk on city bones,
frost an ally
strips of soul (kept here for towns to mourn)
as ancients rise to glass lambs
and wild prayer.

How sleep the morbid brave,
whistling for capers
and reigning sin.
Who is who?
Of carpet cadavers?
The skin trilogy:
birth
and disease,
and dying in a rosy shell
as wolf takes hold...

©Steven Francis poems 2013