Fen
Monuments to Absence
1. Scouring Ignorance
Winds of ignorance scour
The barren, blasted plain of enlightenment
Gaze deep into
The festering kernel of surrender
We never truly lived
We never really grew
With each wet and sucking breath
With each draw upon the malignant teat
The threads of meaning grow fainter
The web of thought diminishes
And lo - squatting in the void - black recesses of destiny
Bloated with countless prayers
Beseeched
Soiled by debased and desperate libations
And in the depths of this voidscape
A weight of impeding woe draws near
Crawling - begging - desperate for some release
A crushing blackened reflection of our own dismal failure
A vast eucharist steeped in the celebration of mediocrity
Flail us
Flail us all
Rip everything we held dear to shreds
And witness the collapse
Unmake the very fundament of the self
For it is of no value
A scourging howl of unrepentance
Hurls a freezing scree that blinds
Eyes flailed and senses flensed
Emaciated fingers spasm
in the final throes of nervelessness
Bereft of worth and purpose
2. Monuments to Absence
Architects of what we sow
Architects of what we reap
Architects of what we know
Architects of what we seek
Look around
Cast a bloodshot, stunned gaze upon
a midden-strew woescape
And know emptiness
And know ennui
and know the bitter sorrow of
all-consuming abandonment.
Resplendent
Empty
Megalithic
These colossal, tragic monuments to absence
That cast feeble shadows onto
the lifeless wastes around them
What once were shining temples
Now debased by a fathomless hunger
Strangled in decaying and warped spectres
Of wisdom long since befouled
The besmirched wreckage of prophecy
Stifling...corrupting...choking...
And again, I implore thee
As stagnant, sanguine ichor fills my eyes
As bleak tears stain a wretched visage
As if holding a mirror to this vignette
Guardian tombs to shepherd the meek
Palatial vaults to avarice speak
Glittering realms - hubris and disdain
To ash and dust and waste - revelation's stain
Look upon
These sad bastions of emptiness
These colossal, tragic monuments to absence
Stood unmoving - a ghastly facsimile of stoicism
Steeped in the echoes of pride now collapsed
And growing fainter with each dying
second towards blessed oblivion
3. Thrall
Too late
It is always too late
To row back from the carnage wrought
By the unfettered march of your own fucking hubris
As gladly we build the pyres
And heaped conceit upon conceit
In a towering furnace fueled by vanity and scorn
We watched the embers of rationality
Spiral into the stained plateau of the sky
Songs were sung
And tributes were paid
As the fires burned and the bodies were heaped
We raised vast totems
And eucharists of celebration
To a new era of thought and worship
From which there will be no deviance
Banners unfurl across scarred stone
Ice shines in the eyes of the guardians of a new credo
Embers drift back to earth as chains
Constricting... binding...
Biting into pale skin
Chafing to bloody sores
As gladly we beg for more
More pain - more punishment
Rictus grins split broken lips that erupt blood
CHoking us with the dorwning carmine finality.
4. To Silence and Abyss We Reach
To truly hunger for something more
Than that which is corporeal
And stands before us in material resplendence
Is the mark of the zealot shorn of reason.
Nothing is too much - infinity a mere stepping stone
No suffering is beyond enduring - for rewards that wait beyond
No shred of dignity need remain - for godhead will transcend all
Yawning oblivion splits open the lies
Upon which this most base course of primordial logic
Lies splayed, shattered and eviscerated
Broken apart on the effluent - stained wheel
Of cosmic indifference
Of the void's disregard
Your incoherent hopes deserve not even pity
Your self-serving wishes are repellent
in their craven worthlessness
In craving for the grasp of oblivion's temptation
Dignity is left as a sad and broken thing
Stripped and ashen, left to wither
A tattered banner of foreboding
- a warning to those yet to come
Stinking blood pours forth on a wave of prayer
Feverish, babbling, debasing
What is it that you seek? What do you desire?
Desperately clutching at the threads of ashen dreams
In the depths of a child-mind grasping for purpose
Nailing hopes to a rotting mast of threadbare desire
Orbiting a dead star of ignorance
To silence and abyss we reach.
5. Truth Is Futility
Lifetimes spent as the lurching ranks of the blind
Hunched, rag-draped, with cold hands gripping tight
To the stooped shoulders of those in front.
Stained and sodden with the filth of hopelessness
Mouths leak with the drool of the lost
Drowning in an acid fog
Footsteps press upon the heaped carcasses
of those gone before
Any vestigial hopes of revelation
Blasted by the corrosive, searing poison
And stunted, malformed limitations
Of our own pitiful senses.
And what will we do
When the wretched and terrified infant
That curls within the core of our being
Stands before the lectern of reality?
In the glare of truth's withering courtroom
A whimpering wraith, stripped of all bravado
Naked, pale and afraid, in thrall
Cowering before the implacable lesson
Of the brutal judgments to come.
Driven back to the stagnant trenches of dogma
and derision we shall be
With yokes made of blackened timbers
strapped harshly to whip-shredded backs
As our vertebrae creak
under the weight of imposed illusion
Our mouths work in silent prayer
to those who pull tight the curtains
Sealing forever the tomb of awareness
to a feeble chorus of welcome
Cursing the futility of truth,
decrying the glare of revelation.
6. Eschaton's Gift
Open wide thine arms
And welcome dissolution into thy embrace - into thy soul
A very universe of needle shafts spearing into thy essence
Shearing... unmaking... dissembling
The bliss of extinction travels on seas of agony
For what more can the last tattered vestiges
of consciousness demand?
What else can await the scions of reduction?
Than the shredding vortex of extinction
From pain, we derive finality - and from finality, release.
We placed our hopes in a gilded cage of unreality
Little more than the crushing, iron-shod shackles
of purest ignorance
Bereft of guild, absent of thought
The very basest, reductive reasoning of the mentally stillborn
Begging for solace in the endless corridors of a feeble fantasy.
Eyes glazed with the desperate narcotic gleam
Of a stunted mind grasping in dependence
Infantile mewling and whimpering shame pours forth
Reaching with tendrils of a child's yearning
For the dopamine surge of oblivion's grasp
In forlorn defiance the shrieking agonies
Carried by the reality of violent obliteration
And so it comes.
The end
It comes on trails of fire and plateaus of carrion
Sown in soils trammelled with malediction's venom
Howling absence
A hurricane of negation
Open wide thy throats
And scream... and scream... and scream
Tracheas red raw, vocal chords split and shredded
Revel in this damnation
For which we begged and pleaded
Craved - as opiates flooding a rotted, dying cortex.
This is what we prayed for
For this is our gift
7. Wracked
It rises within like a wave
Again
A surge, a storm, a coruscating pyre
Pitiless and unmerciful
This agony shows no relent
Freezing stanchions bury far
And paralyse
Every segment of perception broken apart
Unmade, rent, dismembered
A remorseless tide brings naught but havoc
To wage war on any semblance of the real self
And this void-cold pulse grips
Clutching hard - crushing, suffocating
Eyes widen in growing horror
Skin pale, drenched, sickened
Sodden parchment encases shivering remnants
That thrash in a turbulent maelstrom of defective matter
Shuddering and bewildered
Assailed by every sense rendered in coal-black poison
Ripped slowly apart, piece by piece
Unmade - unrecognisable
Pitiful is the degraded residue that remains
Lurching in a forlorn and sorrowful half-life.
The wave is unending
A remorselessness without succour
On your knees, weeping for release
Face pressed against the hot ash of the earth
Crushed and spent
Forgotten and lost
Reduced to naught
But cinders adrift on winds forged
from the breath of the dying
8. All Is Lost
With trembling, thin hands I reach
And peer beneath the apocalypse veil
To alight upon waste and loss and ending
Overwhelming the remnants of senses so frail
The architects of desolation
Lies in muddled heaps and jumbled ranks
Within soils of regret
Within soils of lament
Screaming a song of mourning to the empty halls
Of a sky stripped of all life and meaning.
Too late now to rail at what is
Long ago sown were the seeds of this bitter harvest
So eager was a selfish spirit
To cast its soul to the pyre
And bleach its world to monochrome
Reap now thy legacy
Revel in the hollow shell
On my knees on a plateau of ashes
Scooping forlornly at the dead soils of lost dreams
Clawing at the ruins
To dig back to a time that promised so much
Now a pitiful and faded spectre dangling from the gallows
All has been surrendered to the maw of the void
Charnel gales of decay and hopelessness consume the senses
Revel in the hollow shell
Reap now thy barren and cold legacy
All is dust, desolation and failure
All is lost... all is lost...
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