1. FROST

Meant to rest longer still
Preserved and frozen
Brought to warmth in the deep fires
Where animals burn

Atop the pierced peaks
Cutting through the atmosphere
There spread the frost and spores
That announce the arrival of life

Life that must kill to survive
An evil form of life, if such things exist


2. TELOS

Manifold marvels and terrors of the earth
Tropical swamp under rapturous sky
Luxuriant and monstrous
Wondrously formless trees
Green-shadowed pools
Eyes of the lurking beast

Hearts pounding with horror and mysterious desire
Enslaved sensitivity’s revenge
Sudden strange expansions of your inner space

Devastating invasion of passion
Destruction of a mastered life
Degraded by an unfamiliar god and thrust into the absurd
Skepticism in the face of artistic power
Confession of the hero who is already marked by death


3. HEATHEN SWILL

Pleading with them, begging, dying
Their derision inconceivable
Starve on sand
Subsist on cess and heathen swill
Hateful prayers of the arrogant
God killing energy

Forced prayer fulfillment
With a knee on the neck of god

Clogging divine arteries
Choking the presence


4. ARCHLIGHTS

Psychagogue
Memory of words, memory of flesh
The last remnant memory destroys
Ghostly, choral, anachronistic
And so they are always returning to us, the dead

A vertiginous sense that the past has erupted
That the dead are with us
An invisible twin, the reverse of a shadow

Printed on the eye
Stored in the brain
Coded over skin
Transmitted by blood

The lasciviousness of ruin, moving from melancholy to mourning
Continuous motion of the spirit

Mythopathic moment, the ground possessed
Twin obsessions of death and peace

The god now directs four horses, fire-breathing, day by day through the chamber of heaven
Blue of the ether, divine form

“As for my own dreams, the ones I lost would make it through. I should’ve known, some things just follow until they take”*

Twin obsessions of death and peace

* Michael Herr, “Dispatches”


5. DISMAL ENTITY

Dilated breath
Wandering through crystal webbing
Vast arctic air forms

Vapor clouds of the pure
Silently seeping
Separating cell matter
Dehydrating bodies
Flaking flesh apart

Unfrozen pristine anger awakens
A dismal entity entwined within us


6. CRYSTALLINE EXHAUSTION

Teeming emptiness erases all time

Endless distance, utter void
Subsurface quartzite hive
Lattice sentience overthrown
Dismantled sand

Questioned life, assured death
Estimated existence

Unique natures
Them all enraptured
Reassemble all fundament
Reshaped empyrean