1. |
Cigarette Burns
07:53
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The unearthly gravity of years of regret
Accretion spray patterns from distant paroxysms, growing... swarming
Swarming in apocalyptic droves
Need not look behind or within
I have beheld the withered ends of those hateful corridors
A fractal landscape of monochrome, smothered in dusk
Deep rooted in rot-blighted soil where the worms emerge
I have felt those tendrils reach forth to ensnare
I know once their touch is upon my flesh, they'll never let go
Tonight, rejoice
The coronation of a slavering monarch
And all that wilts beneath his hand
A spectre hangs gallow-strung over your every movement
A revenant of jutting ribs
Witnesses the glory of the end
Tonight, rejoice
The coronation of a walking prison
And all that crumbles to ash within
Diseased and shining like the northern lights buried in 100 years of radio static
Like the northern lights in the funeral pyre of the world
Fused at the tongue to the admission of failure
So I toil alone, wracked with suffocating silence, in this blinding haze;
waiting for the starbursts to dissipate and life to begin again
Blood is thick with spit and ash
Cigarette burns on parchment skin
Voice is thin, ulcer-lashed
with old wounds and holes to rub hurt in
Staggering Slowly Rendered Inhuman
Sinking Somewhere Revealed In
Sleep
I have seen the glory of the end
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2. |
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Stranger to my body
Intruder of your form
The unfurling bile supernova burning
Occludes peripheries and warning
Exquisite carnal reckoning
Impassioned raking of flesh
Furrows into poisoned soil
Symbiotic and hungering
Oh, scourged as I am beneath my veil;
give me a reason to fail!
How can the storm seem to calm
Adrift within your smothering arms?
Incessant carnal reckoning
The frenzied raking of flesh
What germinates in poisoned soil
Symbiotic and hungering
Leave all around us barren
Scorched earth romance tightens incessant grip
Watched by the vacant eyes of my surrender
The very first and the very last of its kind
Terminally luminescent
The truth is my affection is just for show
So that all can breathe deep and let me go
In pyrrhic concordance
Incessant rhythm
In vile harmony we distend
Is this our first kiss?
Is this our last kiss goodbye?
Is this the bliss you've always wanted to try?
Sinking within yourself while your limbs splinter
Sparkling with wasted tears; the torrential rain of the vermin's spit
Begging for you to bring me harm.
Entombed within your smothering arms.
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3. |
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In my seventh year
All the colours burned away
Monoxide peripheries
Ichorous and grey
A wastrels journey
Dragged to chaotic distance
The disconnect made whole
Given to the grave
This fortress of flesh and bone
Beatific in rigor
The bargain is struck, mindless and vile
Clawing out of deeper circles with the hands of a child
In my seventh year the shadows left the walls
The nightmares crept into the days
As days ceaselessly withered with a pall
My wreath of medication woven
My coronation made
Destined to be broken under the yoke
In bitterness I reign
In my fortress of flesh and bone I feel nothing
Not the searing of your touch
The lash of tongues
In my fortress of flesh and bone I am sovereign
In my seventh year I saw so much of the world
My first kiss from the bluest lips
And how the ground collapsed beneath me
The rain caking the ash on my limbs
The rain that never left
The very first day I witnessed safety
It was already long out of reach
Laughing with its taciturn sneer
The majesty of its insult
Mocking me with the violence and the hopelessness to come...
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4. |
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Oh, I'm writhing with life!
The sharp edges dulled
The first touch of mercy swings down on me
Like the last ragged breath that slips away
But oh, I'm seething with joy!
Slow shaking steps toward a fluorescent new day
Their welcoming embrace...
Laughter spills from my lips like the ash from a shattered urn
I'm patient zero, event horizon; the eternal undertow
Point my ravenous love towards whom you want to be swallowed
Draw wretched eclipse closed
The incessant numb twilight of a shattered mind
Do you feel nothing, like me?
I welcome you to join me in this idiosyncrasy;
the absence of all-
but oh, I'm burning with love!
Collapsing within
With the weight of the unachieved
I welcome you to grieve
Oh! The incessant grip of our encirclement;
convulsing and euphoric as it singularly tightens!
And the air is colder than it's ever been
I know nothing of it
There are voices crying in the other rooms
I don't hear them...
And in the recesses where the darkness deepens
That which I can't possibly see
Something has brought its gaze towards us...
Putrefying where we stand like effigies to a decaying opiate god
Pestilential and bloated with life
The absence of all
The embrace of rot
Blossoming before me
Iridescent and beautiful
So unspeakably beautiful
As a crippled vessel, exposed in all its grand failure, reaching for you...
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5. |
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Reaching for flesh that atrophies in total failure
Snowblind in the permafrost
From the unbidden whispers in every witching hour
The spirit runs cold
Sinking below the floor
Where nothing reaches us
The numb solace of the wilful self-interred
The voice whispered...
"Lead us to glorious times; lead us to the end"
Like fault lines spiderwebbed
Like the collapse of cities
Like the collapse of a lung
The curtain rent asunder
Leaving all that's left suspended in the leathered clutch of an opioid grip
So cling to me like wreckage as you convalesce again
And like before deep in my arms you'll find emptiness
The touch that led my heart to ruin
In fraying strands thrown to the curfew's sterile dark
Cling to me for desperation
Reading the epilogues in one another's breath
Below thought and memory of sensation
Underneath everything that is made of or used to matter
The spectre of our future
Beckons grinning as a friend
Lead us to our glorious times
Lead us to our dispirited end
Save us; heal us all
Show us what dreams come in place of life!
Lead us to glorious times!
Lead us to the end!
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6. |
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Throw weakest arms around the vessel
It is swathed in ragged cerements
Dressed in manufactured love
Excruciating affection
Rotten all the way through to the bone
Virulent to the touch
Collapsing all under its own weight
Shambling human wreckage; broken- pitifully so- under the whip
A storm of self-destruction; treacherous, the limerence that slips
Holding onto you with electrocution's grip
All yours
Invite suffering and entropy
To cast away reason and heart with both hands
End turn stone that which life rots of the spirit
Oh! Look upon me and my withering
How I shimmer emaciated in the half-light
Am I not the most beautiful thing you have seen?
Can you feel nothing like me?
Feel the coldness of my touch
Have I pierced the mouldered veil of your sleep?
The haunting began when the colours bled to stone
Oh! I slither through the plush grandeur of the dark
Waiting for you to call me home
Drifting in abyssic opioid fog
The spectre thieving the breath from your chest
Howling through the strangling murk of dreams eclipsed
So join me through fracture
To the precipice from where all warmth horribly fades
The blinded didactic measured with hands of coal
Scratched from poisoned ground
Alas we must embrace as lovers do
At last...
Throw weakest arms around the nothing that's left
There's nothing and nobody to call you home
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7. |
Soul Rot
05:28
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Lumbering from darkened rooms
Slithers through ward corridors
In witching hours searching for the end; for the final chapter
A breathless epilogue and the bliss of release
Soul rot
The terminus of spirits when all is lost
Watch yourself fade to a pinprick
Forgotten and scarred by despair
Give yourself over to decay
To watch everything you loved slip away;
tumourous and bloated by the spectre of your presence
Misery cascades and cripples
Something rotten grows within; festering at its vicious whim
Some other self armed with gnashing teeth that charges forth when all else grows dim
Nascent, it beckons
Cloaked in vile, barbiturate haze;
my own dark halo to mark my final days
I know my hell better than I know myself
And I know what will take it all away
Leave only wreckage and poisoned ground
Cruelly snatches at every inch of reason and swallows it whole
Like parasites swarming from sallow skin
Soul rot
The terminus of spirits when all is lost
When you watch yourself fade to a pinprick
Forgotten and scarred by despair
Torn apart by suicidal rage
Reflected in bitterness as it pools beneath in brackish tides
Everything leathers
Pestilence erupts; spirit deconstructs
Soul rot
That from which I crawl my way back, just to cascade into ruin
Bitterly aware of the shadows that stand above me
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8. |
Something Follows
07:09
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Thrash my revenant form against the gathering dark
That swarms in purulent configurations
I swear I could hear someone calling out from that muck,
the cadence of a voice I hoped never to hear again;
a phantom's cruel whispering to take dignity in the end
Something follows
It has festered in the dungeons of consciousness
And I have heard the hissing wreckage of its call
"To be truly worthless is to be nothing given form
And to waste yourself is to leak that nothing into the wretched soil-
and waste yourself you must, to echo all the nothing you have wrought"
Ruined fingers of light caress filthy skin.
The smothering arms of mercy caress feeble frame.
Thrash my revenant form against the gathering dark
I have slept for decades now
and when I awake, I won't ever be the same;
Something has found me
Something has followed me to my end
It was at the edge of every vision
It lived in the salt of every disgusting tear
Devouring silently like rust, like the end...
The end of the final page
Welcoming and warm
The answer was so obvious all along
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9. |
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This is going to hurt.
Submission always does.
Joining the parade of grief;
an absurd carnival charging onward to the eclipse...
Forward, stumbling blindly, with high hopes of release
Abyssic relief
Forward!
Reaching forth toward those parasites of atonement
Feeling them burrow deep into vein
Watching the hollowness manifest in unprecedented ways
Even the strongest pillar caves in;
even the iron heart shatters.
The shelter a fortress gives is as weak as the fault in you.
This is going to hurt...
As the end is wont to do.
Forward!
The tunnel of misery tightens to singularity;
The pinpoint brightens...
To illuminate strange doorways
For which my heart yearns
And from where emancipation beckons
I have chosen the endless possibilities in the abstract of leaving.
Unburdened in darkness and whispering the promise of absence
I have clothed myself in bitterness;
Unashamed of my nakedness,
undefeated by my will
Gird your loved in armour while yet you wither
Drag the mottled hope from your frame
Given over to the loved
With all limbs thrown to abandon and the husk discarded as all lesser things are
The sorrow slowly smothered as an abomination,
and with it I am scourged of my self-disgust;
and suddenly this is a celebration
To gird your loved in armour while yet you wither
Carving my fate with hands of iron
Into linoleum and oblivion
Spraying rust
In rivers
Become floods
Left for you to find
Left for you to curse your sight
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Growth Melbourne, Australia
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