I. The Sacred Mysteries of Alluvial Yearnings

All the motions of the things there by the sea,
Draped in weeds and blossoming with tendrils of moss,
Etch the progress of their pain on the permanent steps
Of the sand on the beach home they made.
The evening sun enriches them and rebuilds them,
Its light shining through the dense rain.
It's driving on, damn it all, to the head of the river.

So much water, so great a gift
To be so profound
And reach out to pluck a word
That crafts itself into voices unheard--
A bird!--
A craft bitterly unwound.

When there are no stars dotting skies
And no evening lights--
When the trees are left unlit
And the leaves begin to fall,
The trunk rotting inside to out,
There the face of death shall be etched.
Nature bears death's grim visage on her bosom,
A cruel and radiant monument to her loss.

The creatures shuffle back and forth
As though unaware of the habits of earthly things
And uncaring as to earthly minds.
Perception's gave to them
Something beyond the realm of pain,
A roughness within the thick wet.
Something within them moves on still,
Despite the darkening night's yawning bloom.
I lay beside a pale woman, forever entwined
In the withering vine that shall be my food
And yet they move.

What strange beasts, these
That betray the fading ghost,
That shamble as they go.

(Recall those books you used to love,
Redraw their image well--
The burning glow, the greenish haze,
A monochromaticist's hell.
But you learned to love wrong!
All meaning withers away.)

II. Unbearable Lightness

The bipeds shuffle through their day,
Drugged and shipped off to a deep somatic haze.
They paint their worlds in the brutal shades of gray
That they've come to learn and trade,
Wiling away their final days till their retirement pays off
And they can take off to the sea to die.

All faces might as well melt away.
Everyone rots to the same note.
A pride, a waste, an early knell--
Who could tell in this din?
They eternally metamorphose
Into the Nowhere, Nohow, Nowhen.
There is no who, no clue,
No hint of mortality in the fading gray of their faces,
Flat and carved with nonsense marks
To fit the wretched suits and the tasteless ties.

Bite back your tail
And let me get to know your pain.
Choke down your tail,
And let me get to know your shame.

Build a citadel of cynicism,
A fortress of discontent.
Manufacture false pretenses
To paint all their limbs.
Spend precious hours in the basement,
Crafting a monument to your loss,
Then hide it away.

As they walk along the street,
Their eyes meet and they get a sense of what is gone,
The images aflutter in the wind.
Streams of light above their heads,
The sounds of a horn cutting through the shame,
Causes them to cough up anger and split their heads,
Ready to find their homes.
Can a face regrow where salt was sown?

As the sky opens wide,
Down falls rain,
Pure and white.
Breathlessly, they rush to the streets,
Ready to ride the wave back home.
Something from the ground below
Reaches up to steal the show.
Their feet are dragged back to the ground
And the sky evades their sights again.

A river is formed
And the head flows on,
Back towards
The formless sea.

III. The Persistence of Light

The river pushes the cityfolk down
And in a sickening crash, the bodies collide,
Man into beast, flesh into hide,
And in a blinding flash of light,
The shambling beasts reveal to the men their pride:
A sunfire heart, a raven's eyes
And a vestige of humanity.

In the glow of dying night,
The men reveal their secret hearts:
Those who come home
To kiss the dogs of war
And settle into the chair,
Those who would kill the unicorn
Not even to steal its horn
But just to see it die,
Those who tried to see some light
But were dragged down in the fight
For some space to breath.

Pity is spent
And night yearns to go.
The beasts reach up to the skies with their tendrils,
Their unearthly forms shaking in the growing light.
Their moss-like bodies stretch and gnarl
Over the bodies of faceless men,
Consuming and subsuming them,
Before they return to the sea.

The river washed away
The etchings of the beasts' pain.
The city died away in that flood.
To watch the snake vomit up its tail,
To watch the monument to loss crumble and fade,
To watch the day finally break
Provides an image to remind
Of the persistence of light
In the face of that patient demise.

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I haven't done a sectioned narrative in a while. I had a rough concept, a couple themes, about one stanza and a couple lines. The rest came out to fill in those gaps. Strangely enough, I think the parts that fill the gaps are the strongest bits.