Rats' Alley

Rats' Alley

Dead men do not throw sticks or stones,
nor cast their fate by scattered bones,
nor read the truth in random trope,
in crystal globe, in horoscope.

We wait below our lovers' sleep,
we keep our silence six feet deep,
where rotten flesh must fall to free
us from the god of vanity.

Dead men cannot recant their lies,
they have no dance of alibis;
they hide no stone to be unturned,
no lesson needs to be unlearned.

We wait below while lovers keep
their secret safe, their final leap
from love's brief life to frightful death
a matter of a moment's breath.

I knew the love once in your eyes,
a song that can have no reprise;
the verse which once composed was set
in stone, and I cannot forget.

Dead men do not for fortune wait,
nor in their dreaming contemplate
a future reaped from promise sown
of seed that they in sin have thrown.

We wait below our lovers' groans,
where we have lost our lucky bones
to vermin and those curses that
pervade the alley of the rat.

Dead men will turn no prophesy
to visions that the living see
in ravings of the supplicant
who begs for love with tattered rant.

We wait below our lovers' lives,
beneath the vine their beauty drives,
the fuse that burns from brided beast
to blast the flower of the feast.