Cut out the Tongue by Matt Moseman

Of course you are fair!
dear maiden, your sweetness is more than I can bear,
for I am a bitter man, who litters
intermingled sophistry and wisdom on the streets at night.

I am a low supplicant to the dark,
a dark that strains the paymaster more each day
for to compensate with the evil orange of overhead streetlights.

As if they would stave off
the widening mouth of a moonless night,
as if, by personal sacrifice of privately hoarded plunder,
begotten by the malice of their wills,
taxing backbones of humans whose labors bore little,
only to be stripped and grated like cheese--

Little lady that I love,
can you not sense my distraction?
Can you not feel the foundation of my character
crumbling into the soils' liquefaction?

The exodus of my essence is the whim of an entropic tendency we call time--
today is a stone tablet to be smashed at dusk.

I am Dusk, to Dusk I shall return,
never to be the Dawn, as you are,
my girl--I may never twirl my hair
with the hope of a rising star;
it is doomed to tangles at my hands
as I fondle newfound strands of lament and rage,
I die to have faith that their lineage is to be wrought fit for this page.

I am right to take flight in the night,
for my daydreams are all of swift passage.
To where, whence I came--
I keep no account of these trifles!
All my memories are but rifles and smoothbore hand-cannons
retained in the annals of my brains
to rip-roaringly sound such message and meaning as I see fit.

As long as I am alive I may see fit,
I may see shrewdly,
I may see ghosts and even hear
demons gnashing the hate they hold in their abysmal hearts out,
into the world of men's teeth.

Earnestly I say to thee, my faerie queen,
suffer blind sages not,
for they have not seen.

kill deaf priests,
for their every exaltation
is as good as a noose;
better they wear it than you.

and lastly, my woman,
heroine of my heart and liver;--
I would have you cut out the tongues of lepers
that their wretched appeals stain not the artistry of thine ears,
and so that the whole of your pity may fall to me