Dear Sir: Your silence sets my ears ablaze;
   your spurning pen is eloquently mute. [Read more…]

I, the forgotten, rejected, the Great Unwanted,
unwelcomed, unmissed in departing, in loss unlamented,
I who have walked in the umbras of wasted seasons,
dwelt in the midden of others’ discarded lessons,
for none of my betters would taste the nauseous wisdom —
only the dying take medicine, and they but seldom,
for attar of funeral roses is sweeter solace —
I, I alone, know such thirst as to drink from that chalice.  [Read more…]

Between the light of purposed action
   and the darkness of the deed,
a shadow falls. All life is faction:
      man and master, fat and lean,
   mother’s love and daughter’s need,
ungrateful as the worm affection
      bred. A shadow falls between
   a poet’s lips and ears that heed. [Read more…]

This is a fragment of a long ballad of the Falo’i Rogon. In The Eye of the Maker, Azakai, the Rogon war leader, sings it to his people as part of their Yule celebration. But he is mortally ill from fighting against demonic possession, and partway through, his strength fails him. 

In the land of Winter’s heroes,
where the great white Storm Bear wanders,
driving drakes with tooth and talon
   from the place of endless snows,
Where the snow falls like the white hair
on the ruff of Khail, the ghost-wolf,
there the Storm Bear roars and hungers,
   and he ravens as he goes. [Read more…]