Soft Communion

In corridors of candle-smoke and rooms of wilted white,

I met a gentle wanderer: the anthropophagite.

His boots were stitched of funeral cloth, his coat of evening’s gloom,

And round his throat a ribbon hung, still scented faint of tomb.

He spoke in sighs of silted skies, of hunger grown ornate,

Of banquets built from memory, of feasts of mortal fate.

No greed was in his radius, no violence in his hand,

He ate as one might read a book: to better understand.

Yet nestled in his pocket, in a crevice soft and narrow,

A single maggot rolled itself like pearl beside a marrow.

It whispered hymns of carrion to lull his restless head,

A cradle-song of rotting silk, of sanctity in red.

“Your name,” he murmured tenderly, “was given by decay.

A child of dissolution, sculpted softly out of fray.”

The maggot watched with the patience of a creature born of trust,

An angel of decomposition, a seraph wrought of dust.

We strolled through halls of skeletons that slumbered under stone,

Their vertebrae like rosaries the earth itself had known.

He bowed to every ribcage as a priest might bend to prayer,

As if the dead were sacred saints, and he their rightful heir.

He spoke: “O guest of fleeting breath, I do not crave your form.

I only crave the stories housed inside your mortal warm.

For every life is music once, and death but holds the score,

And those who dine upon the flesh learn histories evermore.”

The maggot sang accompaniment, in tremor-soft delight,

Its body pale and luminous as moths in winter light.

It crooned of hive and hatch and hive again, of life that cycles slow,

Of how all flesh returns to earth, of how all gardens grow.

Then silence came like snowfall on a chapel after Mass,

And dust lay thick upon the floor like powdered bones of glass.

He held his tiny larval friend as though it were a star,

A lantern made of ruin, guiding wanderers afar.

And I, who watched, could only think,

with sorrow sweet and slight,

“We are all maggots in the end,

and anthropophagite.”