The dead lay on vellum sheets
Charred bodies, broken, twisted
No mourners weep for them
The priest is gone, the sermon silent

Unwashed feet trample their way
Across poisoned rivers tainted and black
Forgetting the words they sung in praise
Of the dead lying on vellum sheets

Through a thousand suns everything’s
Cleansed with rotting disease
And prophets are hunted with laughing
Insights, no deeper than a mosquito’s prick.

The dead. They lay on vellum sheets
With signs hung around their neck
Declaring how and why they’re dead
But all eyes stare at the horizon glow

And the horizon glows, lifting heads
Up and away, burning through and
Through and out and away the
Wind blows vellum burning sheets

Gray hairs, not yet passed not yet here,
With sadist fear they set them out
Knowing no one sees the dead
Laying on vellum sheets

But gray fades into the black
And even they soon forget
They’ve become the color
Of the dead lying on vellum sheets