When Darkness Falls

Oh, how When darkness falls,
The sky trades its birds for bats, unperceived.
I gaze up at a fallen sky of sackcloth, vomiting ash like snow.
How a tired sun, in the high lofts of a dream,
Shakes hands with shadows and nightmares.
Oh how the cooing of infants,
Become battlecries of war-hardened men.
How children set their toys aside,
And take up iron-clad tools of war.
Scrounging for crumbs of honor as they endlessly blow in the wind.
The wind.
Hanging low as it hugs the cold concrete.
As it tumbles in the midst of the death of innocence.

Leading right to the heart of this creative hell.
Beating, Feeding off of ignorance.

A deep hell. A crator of life and beauty, split open, gaping.
The pit, hypnotizing and spiraling downward,
Heavier than gravity.
Stickier than inertia.
Such endless toil like thin scars retorn,
Yet how victory and tragedy both end up in bones.
Leaving our bloody signature, like oaths carved in flesh.
It's a mockery made, served up like
The aching prod of a brandishing rod.

The glow of childhood fades,
And the curse is realized.
Salvation in on extended vacation.
In this place of sunken cost.
This brute machine,
cycling through and sealing its mark.
As it stamps the soft wax to the shape of it's glowing hot will,
A brutal decree,
An unforgiving totality.