The well where the star was reflected refuses
to cool the coals on my tongue, coins
of incense ash crackling as my teeth thrash
lightning flashes of nights thirst tried to deny
its quench, relentless pilgrim whose travails rail against
men, forgive them and pity no one else,
this decadent’s dissonant hymn is no prayer, even
decedent heretics reminisce, dissolve with rhythmic descent into
dissonant rhetoric, give up their apoplectic unapologetics and
live, for a moment, an imagined instant free
of sin, to drink in conversion and begin
again what I want to end, my suffering
in solitude another generation’s falling, an existence which
offends with perpetual stalling, unwilling and incapable of
crawling toward a goal, accomplishing nothing but total
insignificance, I am become my father’s reason for
being someone who needs to be forgotten, totem
of the failing, innocence fledgling when frightened by
the recognition that I have become his reflection.