Sylvia Sharpentier

A circle of robes, their shadows lurching like ancient clocks,
Scratching their beards and nodding so quiet,
Minds entombed in a cathedral of books, where words
Fall heavy, like tears upon the marble floor of thought.

Unrepining hours hang, suspended in a crystalline stillness,
Each moment a ghost, pacing the chambers of the soul.
Into the eternal pensiveness—a mournful egress to love,
Where the ravened heart takes flight, only to spiral into ruin.

A gyre of starlight lolls across the mouldering cemeteries,
Silver threads weaving a tapestry of graves,
And the ivy weeps—oh, how it weeps—o’er crumbling headstones,
Its tendrils curling like dead fingers, grasping at the air.

Crimson soul, I, to the faraway kingdom of mysteries,
Where phantoms drink from goblets of dusk,
And lamplight flickers like the dying gasp of a forgotten god.
Eclipse me softly, cradle my gothic debris—
The ashes of myself, strewn like ink on midnight vellum.

O bitter woodsmoke, rise from dying ambers!
Like ivy raining o’er red brick ruins, embrace the decay.
Kiss the ground where the dead lie buried,
Their laughter locked in coffins, their words drifting like shadows.

Numberless days blur in the dancing of flames—my degradation.
Lilies and roses lean in solemn conspiracy,
Their scent a hymn to silence, their petals bowing to the dark.
And reeds whisper secrets to the wind,
As if they, too, were scholars of the abyss.

Piano whispers echo in the charcoal cave of a shipwreck,
Notes shatter like black glass, drowning in their own lament.
Where the sea swallows all, even memory,
And the past coils into itself, a serpent devouring its tail.

Here, where knowledge and decay entwine like forlorn lovers,
Dusty tomes cradle wisdom as they crumble to ash.
Here, shadows murmur their verses,
And the lanterns burn with a sepulchral glow,
Each flame a poet's soul, trembling in the twilight.

Hold fast to the drowse, where shadows and scholars meet—
Where twilight blooms eternal, and the stars,
Like trembling tears, fall gently into the ink-black sea of the infinite.