All Innocence Lost

In all that is holy,

In the beseeching and rantings of time to pass,

When the darkened days of a lost generation come to light,

The ashen faces of the forgotten look on with haunted eyes to what is day,

And close to their reign of night,

What is peace?

What is warmth?

If all in all becomes too much to bear,

The ugly scars of the crawling battles,

We were forced to fight in damnation,

Are in all depth seen,

Still, in the daylight, we are condemned,

Ever heart blackened and bruised,

With disappointments and anguish,

And no sanctities of any refuge be sustaining,

Oh, what a bitter day,

And let the ghosts of the past adorn us with a crown of thorns,

And cry out for all the innocents lost,

Casualties of fate,

Memoirs of Manhattan tinkerings,

And the sorrow of the rising sun do claim us all,

A heavy sigh is released,

“It was only a matter of time, little one.”

As the rain of man’s fire washes away our newfound Babylon,

We rise to the occasion,

Accepting this honorable mercy,

The scars of humanity’s floggings defined,

Upon a crucifix of our own,

Evident on the raw and festering canvas of a most despised reign,

Yet, all shall be neigh,

Null and void into the lips of eternity,

However,

That day is not of this precipice,

As long as there is time to come to pass,

The battle shall rage on,

Long before the ice of our existence melts away,

A generation to reside in such,

When the horrors shall rise and fall,

And we have seen much too much,

Dulling our eyes and darkening our hearts,

Though, it is certain of what we know of our fate,

To destroy one another,

To maim and destroy ourselves,

To know our time passes quickly,

To smell the reek of death at every door,

But when the fears and values are no longer of concern,

It is only to be concluded,

That it is so,

That we,

The children of our time,

Shall wander,

All things taken with rueful gusto,

All days walked as if frozen in time,

A generation of sorrow,

A time never to forget,

And…

All innocence lost.