In times of drought, you tend to forget
that your conscience was once as cautious
as a crow’s wings upon landing.
But now your armada sleeps,
and your oaken hallways stained in crimson,
are tucked in and snoring a gluttonous ignorance.
Things that make you think—
the men who built this house
meant for better things.
So strange the ways we cannot see,
we’re running out of everything.
Drunk on wine and mead,
waking memories rising from the time
we crossed the Arctic Sea;
The ice, the earth, the sky, this land—
the vastness that spins under God’s listless hands,
as we walked on water
above abyssal planes as dark as space.
We never quite perfected our escape, in the end—
always the frigid indifference in how the man
becomes a gentleman, then a caveman,
and, perhaps, a gentle caveman,
and at times, a barbarian,
ever thus the everyman.
But on this night, the captains rest
in armchairs, if they can,
and the cupbearer’s hungry looks and filthy rags,
make every dying toes even colder.
And you’re terrified by the thought—
the dread that rests on the precipice;
there won’t be enough in your cup
to help you forget
the city is burning tonight.