AT THE GATES Cosmic Pessimism

There’s a ghost that grows inside of us, damaged in the making And there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought There’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burned all the way down Arabesque ink wandering, winds itself around our ovate dreams We seem to speak only in the imprecise geometries of black volcanic sands Huge, impossibly regular shapes of rutted charcoal rocks hover above us As if waiting We do not live, we are lived Pessimism, the last refuge of hope From a blurred horizon, quiet black basalt pools Bore into the rocks and our own patiently withering bones Slumbering swells of a salt-borne amnesia course through our fibrous limbs Scorched, wandering Brine secretes from every pore The luminous point where logic becomes contemplation Lost in thought, dreamless sleep, adrift in deep space A black glow in the deepest sleepwalking seas We do not live, we are lived Pessimism, the last refuge of hope Around you this night, a thousand million firefly anatomies Breathe in and out in their slow burning, liturgical glow Impersonal sadness, to become overgrown, like a ruin We do not live, we are lived Pessimism, the last refuge of hope We do not live, we are lived Pessimism, the last refuge of hope We do not live, we are lived Cosmic pessimism, the last refuge of hope