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Bodies continue to assemble in the rotunda

Of our dungheap pandaemonium

Amidst the dying echoes of stone, dust, and thunderous applause.

Wordless, jawless,

Marble silhouettes rise in the old light

As an anthem unspools,

Notes falling out of order,

A paean for empty benches,

For ghosts carved with no lungs.

Gilded, ruined,

A curtain fell and gnawed.

Each law—half-remembered,

a ghost in the atrium,

each oath—a hairline crack

tracing the decay.

Ash gathers in the folds of banners.

No one salutes.

No one recalls the signal.

The city is a mouth,

teeth dulled by poison and time.

Jesters stumble in the shadow

of pillars that cannot bear weight.

Laughter, thin as winter wind,

turns inward—cuts,

draws silence.

The point of order:

the law’s ribcage,

already broken,

already hollow.

The marble senate votes in dust;

every verdict rehearses erasure.

Yet—

under the ruin, a longing,

quiet as rain in the fields

A flicker caught in the stone.

A season imagined—

where hands shaped order

from the slow drift of years.

But the ground is hard.

Dreams root shallow,

grain withers on the stalk.

The anthem’s ghost

moves through new ruins.

Emblems peel.

Statues weep.

Names smooth themselves to nothing.

The record overwrites itself—

fracture, then denial.

Each cycle closes tighter:

what revolved, returns.

Sunset strikes the forum,

casts the last shadow.

The long dead republic sings to itself—

notes hollow,

The germ was always there,

in the veins of the marble,

in the paean’s first note.

In the last light,

even stone forgets its purpose.