poetry

BRUTUS

​

Liberty whispers

in the ash in my hands,

its shards I cannot hold

as steadily as my own skull

between my fingers, as the grief-eaten 

faces flashing in spear glints

that now wear our names.

Here our fame hissed in foreign tongue 

tells only of war’s wick charring

itself on its hunger, thirsty 

as Charon or the corpse-glutted sea 

for another rusted dollar, another nameless grave. 

Tell me: What do they murmur 

to themselves, those who lie in sleeps 

soft as scorched linen, a coin in each tiny mouth? 

What chorus answers their silence?

Cassius, the record of our slaughter

bleeds from hands emptied of ink.

Only myth carries us now.

The Republic flickers 

in Macedonian marshlands, and

in the night’s battle-weary hush

my own phantom rises before me

like the bile in my throat.