Phantom, first few verses

Amidst the white and endless sky,

The clouds revolve and tremble;

Turgid tempest blossoms nigh,

Where rage and wrath assemble.

Through lust and mediocrity,

Mankind fell ill to feeling;

There sullen sought monstrosity,

Left man and kindred reeling.

Then storm on darkened gables drew,

And turbid gales did linger,

In districts blood and bleating knew,

Where swords rest cold in fingers.

So silence veiled the lost remains,

And nature ceased to stir;

The slain deluged the streets and lanes,

Where frigid drafts abjure.

And somewhere in a city square,

A squire wrote in blood,

Upon a pristine wall left there,

Whose sermon looms above:

“In every square of land and plain,

The story read the same;

Tempest high and lowly maimed,

Till only grace remained.”

And on the arid, level wasteland,

Stranger by his trade,

Did wander still and sterile sand,

As time itself decayed.

A sanguine cloak his shoulders bore,

That flickered in the gales;

A sword and shield his stock and store,

And mead and rancid kale.

A sanguine hood engulfed his head;

A metal mask he wore,

That neither love nor hatred bred;

No character it bore.

Across the aural desert laid,

A shadow drew adrift;

A rising fog in colonnades

Amassed in stormclouds swift.

Graceful heavens, burdened be,

Grew dark with clouds and thunder.

Cyclones loomed on land and sea:

The dark is torn asunder.

The silence is eviscerated;

Lightning strikes the ground –

An ashen spot incinerated

Smokes without a sound.

Phantom rises ashes from,

A shadow cloaken darkly;

Bound to rise when kingdom come,

Obeying burden starkly.

Darkness clothed the Phantom wholly,

Floating round his form;

Pluming shadow bathed him fully,

Wav’ring null of norm.

Shining eyes of white there sunken

Glared at stranger wayward;

Hollow, absent, morbid-drunken

Eyes returned the favor.

Phantom, morbid, loft and lordly

Hovered there before;

Stranger fast stood wise and worldly,

Wand’ring forth no more.

“Phantom, art you?” spoke the Stranger,

Paying pleasance slowly.

“Art you not a spectral ranger,

Hunting vengeance lowly?”

“Stranger,” morbid Phantom roared,

His booming voice resounding,

“All these golden sands I lord,

As they are of my founding.

“Bid me neither high nor low

Your judgment right or wrongly;

Conjure all the grace you know,

And bide in patience strongly.

“A moment now of tragedy

Way ward you from my preaching;

Take me not as deity,

But shepherd for your teaching.

“I am all of lost society,

A shadow of the dead,

Whose souls transcend reality,

Where man to fate is fed.

“Hatred, rage, and malice straining,

Suffering befalls;

All our hopes and dreams remaining

Spoiled on the walls.

And all my wanted words retaining

Strike me ill with gall.

“Fogs drew out injustice on

A many heath and hill;

Our brazen blades were thrust upon

By black and godless will.

In forests dark with morning dew,

On pristine marble stairs,

In hovels where our children grew –

You’ll find our bodies there.

“Cold and pale and silently,

Our forms are left to rot,

And all those manners violently

Our minds, as well, begot.

“Now darkly do our souls persist

And see upon our gloom,
In phantom ranks we now enlist

To dwell within our doom.

And no human life shall hence subsist

To occupy this room.