Destruction

Destruction

The Devil, busy at my side, infects

The air with vague impalpable unrest;

I swallow it and feel it burn my lungs

And swell them with an endless guilty lust.

Knowing my love of Art, he often takes

The most seductive female forms,

And, with his specious arguments, he trains

My lips to crave vile potions, liquid charms.

He leads me thus, far from the sight of God,

Gasping for breath and weary with the road,

Into wide plains and deserts of Ennui;

And there, before my baffled eyes, he throws

Corpses with gaping wounds and sullied clothes,

And all Destruction’s bloody panoply.