1. THE SQUIRM OF DESERVED ASCOMA

Nature at last our eviction exhaled,
A gaunt abattoir with infection regaled.
From fungus and plume our deformed wights arise,
Shamble and vampirize...

The squirm of deserved ascoma.

A species that forgot its place:
Spores boring flora from out anguished face.

The squirm of deserved ascoma.

And flower Hells,
The cruelest of misanthropies:
That emboldening what already'd...
Sink teeth to itself.

Horror-spore, come forth!

Possess the reign,
Facilitating rape and strain;
Carve our hold with blooms...
Of croaking exeunt and doom.

The overlong dream mosses over:
The squirm of deserved ascoma.

The last of us.


2. WOLFSBANE AND IVY

Where branches twist their boughs
Throughout the blackened woods
Broods that masque, Edenic asp
Sought on lip and hood
Singing snare
Fathered into this dance:
Where once love strode each wild's command
Now vows more Satanic entrance...

String me wayward totem
Shadows put to toothed means
Sheep bleat, fear our hollows
Wolfsbane and ivy

Abandoned to a purpose erst never in our seed
"Whet the jaw! Blood the sabbat! Bewill us to fly!"
Appropriated, our bones for the church his cancer decreed
Bonfire fruit to soothe the wound of the manger
Virtue deemed to have fled these Hecatonchires
After Eden's serpent struck their gardened root
Those born to join the forest in its worship
Turned and left the birthright to witchcraft and soot

Now our psithurisms reek of spited sons
Prayer made the pungence of their bodies burning
But what blood said to devil our sylvan hymnals with its baths
Can efface such paths?

Come back!

Leaves green this skeletal reach in longing
For no further urge to fall...

Still, the unintestined grotesque
Of creation's inverted edifice:
Claws and palates slaked to usurper's whim
Which promptly fosters worms and fungi within

But where slaughters the spell
An older law detrita knell...

Necrophagous shoots and spores
Wind their constant gospel through the ruin of death
Lichening the blasphemies beshrouding our dark
Until there's nothing left

The rites that drank your babes
Unmade while we pine
Oh, unbloodied air
Each prodigal spring divines!

Meet me ageless totem
Shadows true and green
I, darksome peace, I am the wood
I am for your good


3. WITHERING INTO THE AUTUMN ROT

We, the kindling of this whittling onset.
What slumped husk doesn't know this war?
The foetor-scented fingertips spousing our kind,
With foliage and tendril, desiccation and spore.
The arboreal maw,
Dotting suns under teeth,
Qrotesque penult:
Forms bored beneath.
Born betrothed to this lover in the allure,
Twixt earth and bodies that succumb to its trysts,
Some scratch its tally with recalcitrant claws,
While others offer waters from their wrists.

And I find my plot in between each response,
As useful as the rot that these bowers ensconce...

Autumn-wont!

Heart I've drained over stone and bark,
To lend my days more than the mound where we depart...

Undone!
Carrion'd by the cruelty of wind,
My life led to rescind.

Every epitaph eventually fades,
The Nature of the place to disregard ours,
Foregone sehnsuchts unsuccored by...
Even a firmament of posthumous stars.
Thus the desperation veining...
Everything I touch with what this cadence conducts;
Thus the sun-gutted sky and cold of lichened goodbyes,
When I've unhearted myself and it's still not enough.

My worth returns: the dearth of earthward branches,
A forest floor my wasted make to claim.
I lie, my one use preluded with moss,
Drawn over crestfall as extinguished eyes,
Find the night burning my name...

Older-sown than my search,
Worthied in ageless flame.

The burdens of worth and of grace...
Breathe peace back to...
Autumn,
I become.

My heart slows its beat,
Drums with warmth replete...
Drums its gift to death.

Autumn!


4. RITE

Here, fog wanders warily.
Here, moonlight falls too thin,
And the choirs quiet throat and night-announcing limb,
At the squat, dilapidated affront their murk therein.

"I pry wide a path...
For this blood more light, more life than that...
Belying messiah could provide.
Such hollow hands..."

And hence the floorboards gored with that ambition's lurid bark,
But more, the countless eyes felt staring from the dark.

What necrophagous plot contradicts the dead necessitated by glory?
...No less that throng's transcendence involuntary!

For a majesty bidding no knee,
No horror'd lash too deep...
And the forest's taloned rafters still hold...
The Hell born on the perishing's weep.

"I slew and strewed these sons and daughters,
My hands' red weight evidencing the wage,
I should attain in state on high...
But come no winged attendants!
No gouts of power recompensing sin-slaked veins!
Just dark! The shift inside the shadows atop...
What ought to be lifeless remains..."

I am the ill intent...
Who set upon the traveler on a road...
That he should not have been on.

And caterwauled that sunken hovel the last...
Refrain from out its hoarsened chorus,
Curse complete in tongue that lolled in glossolalia pleading relief,
From each stoven-faced pubescent reaching out for his feet.