Feast of Echoes

Prophecy confounds me.  I do not know the truth of the shadows
I see dancing on distant walls, as the clock counts down.  Evidence
is not a part of the future, but of the past, and memory shows
the unreliability of lovers who came on their own terms, a sense
of doom and desperation demanding a sacrifice of blood and seed.
I am not your lover, yet, and perhaps never will be, like the elusive liars
who danced away in the morning light, mourning that feed and bleed
on my words, but that want nothing more than a feast of echoes, fires
burning in memory and hopes that were dashed by a second thought
caught upon the turning wheel of stone that ground grandiose song
into whimpers of a wounded animal in the shadows of the night, bought
and sold with the IOUs of deceitful paramours, their right to make wrong
the amomancies that others will read over my casket, and curse their name,
each muse that flitted like a moth around a campfire of a passive fame and flame.


William F. DeVault.  all rights reserved.