Eleventh Hour

I wrote a poem, and I actually liked this one. Cheers.


Eleventh Hour

Looking up from our sometime midnight post,
Seeing tangled, dangling cypress serpents
Cover up the silent man in the moon,
Puffing the evening through a wooden bowl,
I wonder What is that which comes too soon?

Cicadas sing their dirge of midnight mourn,
Bereavement for a life that lasts mere weeks.
Their small insect lives are culminated
Upon sidewalk, leaking a black-ant stream--
That marching river is a Rubicon.

We are not Caesar; we have no armies,
Nor Socrates; we have but weak wisdom.
Haunted by visions of Ivan's death bed,
My voice craves to disturb the universe:
To thrice roar against what I do not know.

Instead, my protest is suspended by
The candid voice of a triumph's slave.
The sweet-thick smoke lingering by my skull
Whispers in my ear memento mori.
Though widely known, I've heard a secret.

The tobacco haze thins and dissipates,
My personal Styx and aiding spirit
Float away on the currents of the evening.
If you're present when I, too, drift away,
Hear my soul sigh alia iacta est.