Thieves Of Eden Poem by Patrick Frazier

This raven claw burning from theft
With scars as comets across my frail eye
Toward the only good one I have left

Lips trembling from the words
The muddy cherubim I heard
Telling how each had been reborn:
'Because to leave where we had been
You would have to be deformed'

The spaces
Between her cold fingers
Dripping blood off the axe
And how I arrest her chambers
For the cabinet of glass

I'm frantically pulling drawers
Shattering something in the space
Not for gold, or glory, or the members of my race

I maraud the bones
The fairy bones
Inside her resting place

For each bone lights as a candle
Their bones in sparkling hues
And what us, thieves
Must staring see
When paradise falls through

On paths of broken gravestones
Laid out in aggregate inscriptions
I saw old preachers remove their teeth
And praised their benedictions

Gems the size of apples
Adorn her underground chapels
With domed and starry ceilings
And all the coins
The ferryman coins
That my brethren are stealing

Beyond section fifty
The psychotic masks are mounted
In place of anything buried
And around the bodies
Human-like bodies
That take twelve men to carry

Somewhere in her mind
I'm a boy dressed like a bear
And in the fissure that divides
Our holiest from their divine
I wish to leave me there

I returned the bones
The fairy bones
And cursed myself to rest
And for her death
A sinful death
I look to make amends

They say I've lost it
I'll be dead along the year
Blind and dumb
And chasing phantoms in the air
My repentant ears to hear
The mangled lines that memory seared:

'To leave where we had been?
Take this blade and be reborn.'