He had done bad things.

Far away,
In his fabled youth,
He slept in fields swept
Of sweet Jasmine and Coriander,
And the moo of the dragons was his love song;
He coupled with stars that burned
And peeled through his firmament,
And they sang his longing;
O' how their bodies rang.

Those days, good men were easy to find.

As he stumbled on
Through the years,
Fumbling blind towards his own
Great Unknown,
Things began to change;
The rules,
So carefully laid down
In whispers like dusk
Rearranged themselves,
And a great, far-off darkness
Moved in to fill the void,
Sliding within him like some great
Pyroclastic cloud, or his own unmaking.

Old comforts could not assuage him,
And he found no solace in his heart.
There was no peace in the celestial bodies
Of his once beloved stars;
Not even they, with all their wiles like
The end of spring could move him.

Something had gone terribly wrong.

He fell, like a gold weight
In his own lightless ocean,
Azure with loss,
And grasped madly for broken straws
That read like the hands of fate,
His own end.
Slowly he dismantled his assurances,
His own beauty,
His own dawn,
Until all that remained was that darkness,
Mad and wild-eyed and purple-tongued,
Left to claim him.

Now he drifts,
Awaiting the sea, in all her
Brackish black love, her last saline kiss,
And he wonders
What could have been different?
Was there another star
That could have saved him,
Or a few mystic words
Flung through the dark?
Was there respite from this
Final act of mad passion,
Desperate chance,
Diffusion?
It matters not, he decides.
He drifts, and his mind,
Like a thousand shards of
Rose quartz, flung to sea and sand
Leaves him,
And he knows.

There are no good men left.

Penned by my hand on the 25th of Slyphian, in the year 253 MA.