Not Hot Enough

Cremation's afoot

In a mortal's rite of passage

With the guilt and the soot

Only immortality can ravage

I watch through lead glass

The burning of flesh

Sublimating fed gas

To a soul's final crèche

Corpulent dispatch

Ashen crumbs fall to gravity

But the soul unattached

Flees a legacy's depravity

It panics in luminescence

Running from the fire

Suffers trapped evanescence

Incomplete in the pyre

Absolution fails, fruitless lavage

Leaving cindered memories that suffer alive

Rejecting any respite from life's cruel barrage

Retrieving the regrets that reveries revive

How much hotter does it need to be

To cleanse souls' sins that fear infinity?

How long should I burn it, to no longer see

An evil man's soul begging for clemency?

I look closely and, painfully, inspect the bearer

Of a remorseless face begging, baselessly, for mercy

I cannot unsee, vacantly, the eyes of the terror

Of a soul that embraces atonement's eternity