DUST TO DUST

…settling.
The miasma pools,
notes the molten eyes,
the razor breath,
tenses.

Tapering,
a limb extrudes,
advances wispily, tentatively,
gropes recoiling flesh
tenderly.

Trembling, the plume gathers, rears—

Gasping.
The air like gravel,
fingers gloved in ice.
Knowing,
the old man feels his shadow tugged,
turns.

The lash rips across his cheek,
plunges,
finds the stumbling, lunatic heart,
squeezes.
Flaring, the probe bristles, dives,
severing nerve, shattering bone,
******* furiously at marrow—
whipping the flimsy carcass about,
dashing its brittle skull on stone.
Gutting it. Gnawing it. Pounding and
flaying and
grinding
it
down.

To gristle, to gore,
to compost, to clay—
onus, elan, are purged by the wind.

The vessel dissolves:
to garbage, to grit,
to whisper.
To wit:
to sludge, to seepage,
to sewage, to ****.
Lost in the soil
…settling.