The Lazarus Game

Lorcan Black

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I: Totem

At night I dream of a window,
Through which there stands a bald tree,
The many aching limbs scratch the sky.
The heavens hear no prayers.
Drifting grey clots of cloud watch from above and
As I walk, I am dragging a blackness in my wake.

The night birds know no lullabies.
Can the cold, blank face of the moon see this?
Had I a blanket I would cover and leave these dark things.
I bury my grim artefacts at the tree base,
Covering the dirt over them as a cat would its deeds.
Nine black roses growing by the wall see this.

Their briars catch and claw. My ticket's up,
The darkness has marked me, the darkness loves me.

II: Death

From where I am laid down, I have two views:
One is the clear metallic eye of a square mirror,
Busying itself with memorizing the opposite wall,
And a window, swallowing and releasing a single moth.
The moth is trying to bring the light with it,
Crossing and re-crossing between a light bulb and the window.

And soon gives up. This is how they shall find me, finally.
The jet stream flooding the hot waters, having swallowed
Too many pills for my penances. I have come some distance through
Nights thick with half-imagined whispers in corners.
All this water cleanses like a mini-Jordan,
Soon I will be whitened and pure as Christ.

I hang my eyes on the whiteness in the mirror.
I shall be just as untainted, just as still.


III: Resurrection

My ceiling, now, is white with one grey
Smear surrounding my naked light bulb.
Wind rattles the window panes and reminds me
How they had found me at last.
I lie quite still, laid out as if for burial, as if I were King Tut.
Attendants with their torporific capsules greet me cautiously.

They talk in tongues.
Endless, it seems, streams of gaggling heads
Appearing in my view with their doctoring squints.
I am inspected in parts, to be assembled
Finally, when my anatomy is complete.
Here are my arms, I say, cut but working nevertheless.

You could use them, the fingers --see? They work.
They will be useful at the end, when I must claw through the dirt.


IV: Lazarus' Awakening

The sky emits its pearl from behind curious clouds.
Pale stars wink jealousies at my feet, and I walk godly.
I am Janus with my two god-heads.
The doctors glitter my new stitches with smiles,
My Frankenstein psyche- and then I knew like Buddha knows.
Now I lie quite still. There are no moons here to

Illuminate my little black mausoleum, my blackness rests with me,
A great rock I must drag after me.
Rhinestone sprinkled skies peer in through the O-mouth
Of my tomb to where I wait, biding my time like
Penelope, awaiting the end of this bizarre Odyssey.

Starlight runs down my walls with the hours; the
Painstaking fall into dawn…

 

Lorcan Black is 20 years old and currently studying for a BA in English Literature.He has been previously published in magazines and online literary journals such as Eratio: Issue 6 , Ygdrasil , The Coffee Press Journal , Ariga and Specimen.