Ruin-dreaming

Poem in English, written at Poesiaueropa 2023

Listless, the walls came
to me. Weeping,
they tried to tell their story,
but were denied
by the pressures of

someone else’s cruel, blistering leisure
that, caught along the cliff-face, has
become —
well, not quite a particular form of erasure,

but a promulgation of
something beyond self-censure.
What is it?
There aren’t words, really, to describe it, even if you
somehow have tenure
in Memory Studies.

Not a cocksure
laughingstock, of where they hung prisoners
to die, from those cliffs and weeping walls
but a cascading.
A flash — brilliant, and so rapidly flash-fading
that all you see is a Chthonic, oil-rainbowed
waterfall

over where all our psyches used to once roam free.

Over where they starved, tortured and executed
what remained of destiny.