1. THE GATE

The path gets straighter and narrower all the time. The years press in.
The path becomes a knife edge and I creep along, holding on to even that,
The years closing in on either side and overhead.


2. OBSOLESCENCE

Dread malignant specter
Ruler of a kingdom under rock and root
Pulsing with the electricity of earth's tendrilled hand
A vast labyrinth, milled and barren
Echoing with the piercing cries of an astral body bent and broken
Reverence towards none


3. CULLED

A distant light draws near
Radiates from the zealot
Flickering heat rains on ensnared prey
Shadows form the noose in a test of will
Chaos bludgeoned into conformity
And atrophy cured by disavowal
Judged by revenant commandment
Silence reigns
The drove fed with a gutter sermon
Spinning vortex of shit
Enciphering will as truth
The blood apex
Indignity
Descending under and through


4. ROTE MIMESIS

The stream of lifeblood choked to a drip
Exacting a just retribution
And digging down to belief
An audience to the final call
Feral and seething, with eyes sewn wide
Drawing down the sky
Chaos is my epitaph, etched into stone
Cast eternal by a fire immemorial
Lying prostrate to an icon
Sired in the dirt and bled dry
Floating untethered and unmoored
Scenes of a nightmarish vision drawn in red


5. LIMINAL RITE

The billowing smoke of a life extinguished


6. WREATH

Laughter in a ceremony of grief
Praising fealty to a diseased idol
My hands cast to stone
On a futile climb up the tower
Eternally scaling but never eclipsing
Moonlight casts weary shadows
On masses bled dry in a savage ritual
Hysteria avowed
Worship targeting a wavering beacon, a wandering eye


7. CADAVER SYNOD

A force under tension
Carbonized and gnashed with teeth
My body, a prison of density
Composed of a masterfully invocated,
Cacophonous symphony of error
Predatory eyes menace through an ashen veil
Ghostly and fleeting
Synchronicity as blasphemy
Multiaxial heretic
Ancient bones ground to dust
Molting my skin, a layer of weakness guised as strength
That once shielded knotted roots from a blazing sun
Now decaying into earth


8. TERMINUS

My existence chained to this rotting vessel
Pallid eyes call to me
A captive bound by time
With flesh seared by an itinerant destiny
Vibrancy wrest from our grasp
Borne by tide and littered with arrows
Commit my body to flame