Nineteen Lost Images

Nineteen steps to the candle

And the first wings fluttered

Nineteen songs to the gods

For the final words uttered


And you close your ancient pages

For new songs to be sung

And Phoenix is a myth

For tears that had stung


Living through the pictures

Save my fallen day

Grace this broken night

Running by the clay


And nineteen crooked eyes

With withered fingers call

Creatures of the darkness

And I am standing tall!


Prayers for the forest

For the wildest muscle-rains

And the mountain-swollen moon

With nineteen stolen pains


Throes of desert-birth

For children of the flame

To pawn your plastic mask

In return of a name



For the worship grows taller

In our night-weary sighs

As mirrors hide those scars

Of nineteen bitter lies



The same old ill-starched stage

The fox and the hare

You reach out for the skies

There's a sniper hiding there


That strange light beneath

the jaws of the cold

You need a hopeless house

To find that hidden gold


The window hides this void

With nineteen fallen leaves

to burn my shadow down

And the river never forgives