Lullaby

A boy frolics in a graveyard,

He twists and turns, swings and jumps.

He backs away from the distance, the past he left behind,

The future he’ll never have.


The ghosts look too. Watching him wistfully,

They reminisce on olden days, a golden haze.

For a moment, they forget the bounds of mortality

And morality and they join his mellow motion.

The heroes and the artists: one in the same.

The unnamed and enamoured;

Tragedy took them, but love keeps them

In the garden of memory, the final equality.


The angels watch from above and smile,

Using their trumpets to play a hymn for the jolly ensemble,

The graveyard becomes a party, the living and the dead; ravers.

Animals run amidst stamping feet and heaping peat,

Crows and cats and mice and bats, crying out their names.

Children stumble by, pointing and staring at

The friends they shouldn’t see.


The boy doesn’t notice any of this, still spinning with mind whirring,

On his cheek glistens a single streak as the sky begins to weep.

The trees offer him shelter,

Deep green canopies dropping reddish gifts;

Some helicopter seeds, acorns, pines line the floor,

As the rain is pattering a song we’ve all heard before.