With thunderous implosion our
     brightest love’s tarnished devotion
     reflected that of the Rome of
     the West, that which fell in the year
     four-seventy-six after civic
     unrest, our detriment met when
     we hit our hell, when we tried too
     hard to be our best, perhaps, though,
     if we’d been a little less…our
     own priesthood aggressive in its

plasma-polished policy of
     supporting a pantheon that
     demanded human sacrifice,
     our more-mortal hearts held high as
     our ascendant minds blunted their
     knives, while shouting zodiacal
     cries usurping prayers lied as we
     bled out into night, fleeing doubt’s
     first house with reckless hope thrown on
     the glowing pyre of an altar

of an impossible, and scorned,
     autocratic father we’d both
     elected as our counselor
     and doctor, circling planets and
     raping them like pillaged brides of
     illegitimate war, cold stars
     torturing our own daughters, bards
     devouring our children like old
     Saturn in one of his darker
     hours, this more potent force of our

attraction lawless in its hard
     abandon of gravity and
     allowance of such enemies,
     with their misdirection of such
     enmity and atrocities,
     that was when we came to be so
     impossible and sought after,
     demanded by an audience
     of gawping herds, onlookers to
     follow constellations of coughs,

and grunts, into acting out what
     their desecration of sacred
     silence, with their anything-but-
     subtle science of pretending
     at tolerance, turned defiant
     this blind triumph our entwined lives
     maligned when we failed to open
     our eyes and, instead, let in their
     ferocity’s more rapacious
     cousins, chaos and violence.