On the Image

 It’s over now, so
 amid its splintered ruins
 I wait—
 Do you hear that?
  
 The pat-pat-pattering of
 nails, piercing holes to forge
 something new.
  
 A creature born of
 gnarled arms, broken
 against metal cages that stood
 after the fire had died.
  
 It lived beneath the house—
 a harbor for our sins,
 a fortress, indeed, but for
 the opening in the cellar wall,
 below the portrait of an old friend
 who smiles only when still.
  
 Creeping through the forest,
 all paths converge before returning—
 improvising is death, here.
 Look! See in the space between trees,
 but do not let your eyes dwell.
  
 Purgatory is damnation enough,
 to those whose sentience
 lies the heaviest, rolls the hardest
 back down into the cellar again.
  
 For why leave if not to return?
 this is the dogma that saves.
 The captor opines as much,
 coping forever with a violent abrasion—
 the end of his gleeful machinations.
  
 He dances and the world shakes;
 like anyone, he grows weary,
 but the bitter song of evening comes
 to break his calcified soul.
  
 Once into the woods I went
 looking for a place I knew was lost,
 built by hands not yet formed.
  
 Curse this ceaseless epilogue—
 my unpitiable plight…
  
 Can you hear it, too?