Ashes, Ashes

Ashes, Ashes, all fall Down

Like the ashes wet and warm in the smoking base of the ring of rocks

Ashes in the road to fill the holes to let the travel go

Ashes in the air that I can see to hide the mountains that I can't see to fill me lungs

Ashes on the pillow that the towers once were, that hides in a bag in my closet
Ashes of the workers where the towers once were that hides in the pillow that hides in the bag in my closet

Ashes in my eyes
Ashes in my lungs

Ashes, Ashes, all fall down

From Ash you have come and from Ash you will return
From Ash you have come and from Ash you will return

I was formed of the ground

He proposed with a ring made of the paper band of a pouch of pipe tobacco in the stands of a dusty dirt race track in central NewJersey.

She was from a small working town full of factories.

They made it ten years...
-I am from Ash.

I live in a town where the dust falls all year long,
and the land powders up in the heat and blows,
but there is no wind, and precious little rain.
-I am from Ash.

He is mindful of us, because we are but made of dust.

Filled with the living water (what, over ninety percent?)

Mud creatures
Gollem, the soulless walking clay.
harbouring light.
endwelled by a tiny spirit
that grows and melds and one day leaves.

We are from Ash, and to Ash we return.

David asked to be purified
We were told by the prophets that we'd be sifted like wheat
Reduced to Ash
Ground to powder
Added to the water

Till one day the Spirit is released
the weight is dropped
with a slumping thud

the slowness of mind
the limit of speech
the weight of this body

is left
Where there is only the Sanctified
the Glorified
Purified
Sifted

Shimmering for a little bit, blinking and smiling
while the Ash
blows away.

(' Have mercy on Me, Oh God, According to your Unfailing Love, According to you Great Compassion, Blot out My Trangression, Wash Me from my Iniquities, and Cleanse Me From My Sin...'
-(David Psalm 51 (but you'd do better to hear Charlie Peacock and Vince Ebo sing it on West Coast Diaries Vol. 2.)