Ills To Which The Flesh Is Heir

(Part 1: Funeral Horizons)

A tear that is endless,

Within me a cascade of dark falling waters,

The sky strains with the weight of sorrow,

Death is not enough to grant peace,

Torment haunts the shadow still,

Pain has left the legacy of its disease in me,

.... Your disease in me....

I can draw no slumber from a bed sodden with blood,

Holding only dreams watched over by vultures,

The world about me lays silent less for weeping....

Heavy for the heart, black clouds hang,

Only their darkness has enough cold now to numb me,

Thus all shadows will bow their heads,

to kiss my brow....or to drink of my life,

What of this awful vault above these mountains,

from whence do these tears rain upon me?

From whence came to me these visions?

That inspires me to the forms of death...

And the anatomy of its misery…

Monarchs of emptiness,

Spirits of all despondency,

Summon your worms to their supper,

To the purging of my very essence,

Summon then your devils to my grave....

To mock me within those dreams of damnation,

Such dreams I could not believe,

Like hooks in my skin,

like cold hands tearing my flesh away....

And like chains around my neck…

Choking me to death....

Is this world a dream?

Where I have known the dead to walk,

This world filled with deformity and the agony of disfigured faces,

Where I have known the dead to scream....

(Through me you enter the city of woes,

through me you enter into eternal pain,

Through me you enter the population of loss)*

Soaked to the skin with your saliva and urine,

my mangled flesh stained with your vomit and grime,

Oh friend, to me you are dead, let the worms govern you,

in their parliaments of putrefaction....

Like pestilent priests in a cathedral of corpses,

God is dead, His children are dead,

For now they would preach to insects as their bodies lay in earth,

Decomposing far sightless of the moon,

They are the dried blood and wreckage

(Part 2: Collapse)

Chained to engines of neurosis,

My life is a wheel of perpetual humiliation,

Sorrow burns me, hideous regret breaks my soul,

I collapse into a realm beneath even the contempt of humanity,

I am closing my eyes to die,

Abnegating the life, feel myself falling,

My thoughts become shapes floating in the ephemeral tide,

Blaspheming existence!

I have sought purity, and my search has ended only in pain,

the bloodied wealth of pain!

I have become impoverished through my own aseity,

I am dreaming a season of Erebus,

I am drifting a sea of stagnant, mouldering ether,

Beneath the sanctum of flesh, I am growing defunct,

With an accumulation of darkened tear drops,

Through which I can no longer see,

Through which I can no longer feel,

.... Abandoned, bereft, bereaved,

I descend upon a dominion of grief,

Self crowned abomination in a benighted realm of pandemonium,

I have perceived my body to accumulate rot,

I have been pre-destined to fall....

*(Dante)