On Barbed Summits

by Dennis Villelmi

Cruel comedy to be sure- stepping down from the highest
ground of an unnamed cemetery, and struck that some "turn of
religion" had us on leashes. A turn executed yesterday, or in an
epoch buried under accepted that history?
I tended towards the cemetery on those morns that came in like a
grunting drunk, when life had an odor that summer made unbearable.
"The summer summits of the dead," as I'd say were my incense.
it was when all was wrong, and friends and strangers both had a
damnable pallor to them; they'd pray and petition until finally Law
called for the summits to be off limits to those who'd gotten "off the leash."
Often afterwards they, friends and strangers, say, 'Come to the gutters with us,
and await the Lord's storm to wash us underworld.'
But I the lazarus had a the luxurious vision: of sunrises angrier than Achilles, and
the glare on plate glass behind which were the assembled dead, their skulls staring past
the amnesia that kept us dogs.
The dead- they carried me up to those barbed summits, the Silent Opera playing over the
radio; the radio turned up loud to drown out the din of myth-renovation.
On barbed summits, overlooking my hometown of Moseley, I paid the toll to the last drop,
and now have the tribes the Law forbade.