Because of Words

Without poets to connect
The consideration of the mind
With the backbones of the dead
We should be two earths
Rather than the sun and its reflection.
The dirt.

The dead are one earth
And the mind is another—
The same, but somewhat intemperate
And more muddled and premature
The separation lessened
At birth.

There’s a spark of the Devil
On the paper below the pen
No moral is intended. Even prone
To dispossess, the language of larks
Into lit protest, and the words
Are broke.

The costume of a corpse buttoned
By the burial in a figure of speech
Destroys not our work
Nor muffles the bell of thought
But the moment of final exhalation to its mute hour
Is rotten.

Flesh is the soul of sound
And breath is the evaporation of indifference
But writing words like facetious and abstemious
Decorates the atmosphere of every vow well
We turn the phrases
And tread.

Wherefore by the bright face
Of each key and point we drain
Our thoughts together with our mutations
In a spectral shower
We rest between expense and expanse
And live.