Your feet will be the first 

to approve of your sins, nibbled 

to stumps by salt-foam teeth.

You who have eyes 

only for the cloud-wetted sky

paint oases on your parched lips. 

The sand listens, the sand

sees. Lured by your song syruped

in black-slick lies, many creatures, 

though little, crawl from their burrows 

to amass mountains of your darkness

that left their hearths coagulated.

You have always chased far horizons

with a face pearl-masked by heaven,

and hands, petal-soft, hailing gods

that spin strands of light to gold.

In the age you reigned, a steel tower

overlooking fractured soil,

the love you sought in a smokeless field

is a dream sweated on silk sheets. 

When the sun drinks in blood red,

and the coral spits ash and vapor, 

your eyes that once marveled

upon a blue-swelled ocean

will roll as the crustaceans

and barnacles, fleeing fire,

name your mouth their home.