Graveyard of Dead Poets

And there we lay -
Our souls entwined,
Our bodies at waste;
Passion lay dead in the tracks trodden by habit.
You wouldn’t know.
All words of love
That had done us mellow –
Colourful as the spring and sprightly as a swallow
They seem now to be
But the burnt remains of a plundered bee-hive,
In black decay.
All words of passion
That could arouse us
And let us loose as if a raging Spanish bull;
All fantasies of the most beautiful and the artful,
now left none but thin air
Reeking of the rotten carcasses
Of our once-throbbing hearts.
Every bullet,
Every slogan,
That had once set our faith aflame –
Left nothing but grey ash.
We lay in waste.
You wouldn’t know.
It was not a graveyard
Sombre in death,
For
Every word truly once felt
Now hung heavy
In the mesh of dead poetry –
Rotting,
The pungent stench keeping the decaying bodies
Alive in disuse and waste
In the graveyard of dead poets.