Through the Dark

my mouth makes a noise:
     is it a cat?
     a child?
it creeps through a graveyard
its tongue pulling it along
     the great vacancy
     behind it
     a new kind of oblivion for the dead:

in mouth there is no rot
no bones to be dried
nothing ostentatious
even breath and eating
are from some other place

and it pulls itself along
swallowing nothing
soul's antithesis
leaving nothing
but tracks
an occasional belch
and a faint noise of invisible wheels

from Oedipus' First Lover (2009)