I liked 'on the brink of no world at all' but then realized that 'brink' was in another quite recent poem and one can't be using the same words all the time.
Never
Possibly because of the churchyard’s remote location watchmen were
employed to guard the churchyard and prevent the digging up and selling of the
bodies of recently buried parishioners.
The Church of St Thomas
The
darkness is hypnotic. Every night
gathers
desolate sounds one might not hear
that
might be something in the trees or yet
could
be the soft push of the resentful
spademan’s
spade into soil. Without lanterns
on
moonless nights, so that their distended
shadows
are not thrown across impassive
headstones,
they arrive among the remnants
of
silence, perhaps by water with hushed
oarstrokes
or comic, hissed admonishments.
It is
the freshest flesh they come for, still
young
and beautiful sometimes and haunted
by
its recent life. They curse and are cursed
by
their line of work, the economics
of
supply and demand that turn into
hallucinations
on the edge of no
world at all, the other side of never
and memories of murder
in their eyes.
