The one death spared

He grips palms tightly round a beer while aerial bells from churches taunt like widowed gunfire coming near, awaking those whose passing’s haunt. His cap hangs yawning round his cheeks that fold in fabrics blindly sown. He walks into the mountain peaks and ponders at an unknown moan. The savage face does night entice in scopes less proper then art might. His legs, dry bone, and so his price when barking does not cause for bite. Now to his knees, this creature raised all vastness in the mountain plain and wallowing calamitous gaze he stoops and takes what name remains. He finds the old man, sleeping still, oft guided there as doves do sing. Atop the mountain phantoms fill: The man, his wife, two rusting rings. The thing onto the crags crawls nearer, crouched and baldly branded as were never seen, past far the mirror tall, with glass a dim and dulcet blur. He laughs and howls an ill-timed thirst to rouse the man as wolves the moon, and lowers onto ashes cursed the fate eternally too soon. Few ails and pains beneath the night disguise an engine’s awry sound The black-eyed skull sits looking white and wipes the mirror he had found. The man wakes to this audience, the stranger, strangely bald and black, defending his sweet transience awed by the black-eyed jumping jack that somewhere had transformed to coal, the blackest heart that gutters fill and armoured with the stunted soul that covers his reflection’s chill. The sagging skin, fatigued and foul from wholesome claims to lives mature. A single handed prescience prowls, He answers to a master’s cure. He turns and looks upon his prey, and squinting past unearthsthe bar where now he and the man make way while sharing his last lit cigar.