Since My Beloved’s Death

Since his death, my cryptic lover has arranged my life right over

Into something odd and eerie, weird, disquieting—I’m leery

Not of ghosts, spirits, phantasms, or of devils’ arcane chasms

But of gaiety and sunlight and those things that once were right

For breathing life into old souls—now my new kinship is with moles,

Uncanny, strange, peculiar, creepy, and with bats, with creatures weepy,

Wailing, enigmatic, curious, with things dark and dire and spurious—

Now, unnatural and bizarre unsettling things surpass by far

Those former comforts and delights that soothed my days and lit my nights.

With my lover’s jarring death came an uncanny loss of breath

That turned my sense of truth elastic, to include the strange, fantastic,

Doubtful, worrying, portentous and the puzzling, the momentous—

I have seen since that dark minute all the sinister things in it

Turn to lovely deviant longings, love of the aberrant, wrong things,

Something like a lust for sorrow and disgust for growth, tomorrow,

Or any such former hopes—now esoteric isotopes

Reflecting what I once desired, but with a twisted, counter-wired,

Left-handed version of the past. At this I might have been aghast

Before, but now it’s all I crave, since both of us lie in the grave.

For that, you see, explains my ache for things outlandish, no mistake:

That when my late beloved died, I did so too; am at his side

Within the crypt, where our decease no more is strange or ominous

But makes it plausible that I should love the darkness where we lie.