The Ides of March

Death has a strange taste. I am heavy with it and every graveyard answers. For Rome. For Rome. Ah, such a dagger to drum on this day that you would smile and call me friend. I weep your demise into the sound of my breath. Returned and recycled with the eternal devil, I am cold. I am cold. Would that I could scour your belonging from my mind with the fading of this fearful night. Exile me. Hate me, when all I want is here. Here, I fall, here. I lie, here. I am. Here. And still, in all my piteous hope, I cannot hold back the day. I watch in salted ruin as the sun breaks crimson as any king. A feathered and fraudulent heart, and I bleed with the naivety of its restless pounding. Peace is not enough, sleep is not enough, death is not enough, for those who chase extinction. The assassin stirs. A brave and valiant soul they say, when truth is such a cunning dancer. As one man, we have talked of life and death as if it can be born so easily, carried on a single kiss perhaps? And yes, I believed them. Every sigh. Every word was persuasion to my vanity. I even thought I was the protagonist for a while. There was a Brutus once. But no matter, no matter. I am cold and everything burns. Everything. In the fall.  We have run aground, my friend. Not in our stars, but in ourselves, broken on the rocks of a thousand ambitions, and I am held against the wall. For friendship brings such silent chorus to this barbed horizon, and I wonder if I will still carry your name in the corners of my mind? Already I miss your silence more than your words. So the golden-haired sons have spoken, and for all this lament I still hold steady with the inking of my shadow. Beware the Ides of March; so it is that warnings have a way of keeping score, and it was never that I loved you less, but Rome that I loved more.