The Opium Den
Milk-white smoke was suckled from the oak of Avalon
which gnarled at our pomposity 'til all respect had gone.
We looked to heaven's entrants from our thrones of thistle-mead
and judged our masters' writings like gaunt saplings to the seed.
They whirled us like a Dervish up to unexpected heights,
we saw Death, like an arrow, cut poor dreamers down mid-flight.
We sipped a liquor tourniquet, a pleasure-dome forlorn,
and slipped into a kingdom from whence radicals were born.
Our screams for revolution reached the Sacrificial Spire,
but we had licked the nectar Death had held in heaven's fire,
and as we fell with broken wings down from the blinding sky
to drown in pools of drug-laced tears, we heard no mourners cry.
T. Grayson