close your eyes
shut out the fickle light
leave this place
where your feet drag in the devil’s dust,
your arms flail in ancient red slime,
and blue skies have
turned gray with
the ashes of drunken dreams
fear not what the old ones have said
about the last gasps
let your body
find the indifferent earth
where the light you have always craved,
like one eternally bedeviled
by a desert thirst,
becomes a soft black song…
*peto somnus