Cemetery Queen

There is a place where trees grow of marrow,
branches end in alabaster skulls
roots terminated to boney toes
and everything in between is pervertedly composed
of everything in between
(for it is common knowledge one needs more
than decrepit vertebrae to stand Death’s ghastly howl).
This glade of skeleton trees, an emaciated sanctuary,
is where she called home.

Funeral dirt clung close to foot
and graveyard dirges woven in hair:
frail appearances belied her cadaverous august,
she ruled over the exsanguinated barony
as the Necropolis Sovereign.

She ruled, forlorn in her pallid beauty:
paler ever still by mother moon’s light,
from her imperial sepulcher
these judgments are graven on angel bone
and punishments are macabre grotesque

Though at day, asleep in her hallow charnel
she dreams of fields without gnarled skeleton trees
divine land where Death dare not dwell
before she atrophied and became anemic as she is majestic
in her sleep she screams: When I am Seraph, this is true!

But only the dead dream so dismally.


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Credit Due Where Credit Is Due: Neil Gaiman for inspiring me and providing the imagery of a skeleton tree (though, he had fingers not skulls and didn't go into as deep: just the roots as well) and vaguely inspiring the cemetery queen with Laura in his book: American Gods. Go read it and see what I mean. Thank you, Neil Gaiman, though you will probably never read this.