I’m just along for the ride.
I might have been anything—
plush velvet, carmine folds, beautiful opera-wear
to stand out in a crowd. But it’s been so long,
I remember little beyond the crypt:
a blood-spattered funeral drape, tattered at the edges,
chewed by mice and moths—
by the clawing hands of too many victims.
They take hold of the hem of my garment,
and I drag them along for a time
while they plead with me to change their fate—
but they all drop off in the end.
I am not the one who chooses.
They choose.
We traipse through these rooms, fantastically decorated—
blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet—
and black, suffused with a crimson light,
the rich shade of the ever-living, ever dying blood
that stains my folds.
They scream, they cry, but I didn’t ask to be here either,
though I’m enjoying the whirlwind rush of the whole party atmosphere.
They wilt more swiftly than blood flowers that bloom and fade,
and I—in the end, I lie here on the floor to mop them up,
just one more funeral cerement, not big enough to cover
an entire party full of revelers, whose death strips them of form,
of fashion, of the wealth that made them think they had the right
to sequester themselves and party
while the rest of the world burned.


—with thanks to Edgar Allan Poe