his dream was always of a cart, carrying
limbs like those in so many slaughter houses
dragged along by two oxen, blind, backs whipped
by a golem whose red eyes illuminated
the path, the cart's carrion, and even
the black sky
when he would awake, he would feel
ravenous, not sated by his breakfast mush
or his noon repast--only when he sat for dinner
would he be full, after he drowned himself in wine, and gorged himself on a feast of flesh, charred yet
dripping with blood
the same sanguine soup, perchance,
he saw flowing from the wagon of his dreams,
the same as the crimson ooze from the humps of
the beaten beasts who transported
the ghoulish cargo to some crypt
in the greedy earth
to someplace he longed to see and
to be, in the dream, the one from which
he would awake with such perverse
hunger for life
*lebensunwertes leben is the German phrase, coined in the early 1930s, meaning "lives unworthy of living"