(whisper the last lines)
…and I saw rising from the oceans the great behemoth and the leviathans – Harvey, Irma, and the raging Maria. Cthulhu had been released from the wet, cold depths by the hand of man. Secret covens of warlocks and vampyrs called Republicans and chief executives. The new state and the soft fascism of the globalized corporate rule….
In this feverous dream, next was the body of our victims locked away in a chest looking at me with that blank stare of doll’s eyes. Wide black eyes, its head tilted to mine. Seemed to ask a question…why? Another rotting in the mattress within my bed…it was my victim. My only victim… I hit her no more than once. It must have been lights out. It was enough.
So the virus spread and all hell was knocked offline in that moment. You know it’s the end when the lights go out and all the death you’ve engorged becomes so much writhing serpent of maggots filling you like a gas-bag ready to explode. You can’t wretch it all like so much tangerine bilious solvent either…it just circulates, eroding your consciousness…spinning you into madness and finally…cool oblivion.
It wasn’t so much that we changed as we became more…ourselves really. Our lost selves who barely recognized the visage in the mirror…. No meaning, nothing to set your foot on, vertigo, and the world upending with the spasms of a wretched mother giving birth again to the fetid squalor of nine hundred bloated specimens of horrid decay. Our children come to life once again to look at us blankly asking eyes our own without pity or remorse. After all there was nothing under the bed that night. It was only peaceful emptiness…or maybe something else…?
Clattering china and waves pounding porcelain tile…we didn’t panic…yet. Locusts in numbers with Panhead Fat Bobs and softail choppers whipped into speed, teeth gnashing and fist rites sting like some mad Scorpio rising. Metal and flesh…bones crushed and snapped for Colonel Sanders’ gravy banquet. Spinning again and then it was all quiet really. Darkness…. They didn’t take us this time.
When the rain came and the sewers overflowed, they lived in palaces far away. Island bunkers, golden submarines, luxury siloes, walled cities, and even a space station orbiting with the orangey cheesy moon. Why worry when the world’s problems can disappear with a splash of lye and antiseptic spray? As long as you still have your shoes…right?
The fire demons, efreet and smoke deranged goblins they held capture and could set loose over each horizon. Like ash and wormwood spirits spitting fire to envelop and release forever that lively fluid of peaceful silence and spinning death. Embrace it little ones. This is our world. You who barely knew to wipe your privates each morning or saw the brittle glass they squirmed wet with sweat. Writhe now and sleep huddled in your little nest. We have you now.
Fire, flood, waste, thunder and a reeling world turned upside down. Inside out. This by the hand of man is really only our doing. You may share the joy, but only as you feel the precious agony deep within. Up on the 32nd floor of this nightmare…. Our place under the sun while you grimace in these chains we’ve forged for everyone. Sealed like matrimony to the death and despair you’ve raised and nurtured like so many fields sown with dragon teeth.
Into this lovely world of grace, power, and gilded trappings we give you our love in the same form one thousand times again. He is the destroyer, but he levels in the name of gods we secretly sanctify over again. Loosed ten thousand times, this day he thirsts for you and your love. Run. Hide if you can, but our demons spread throughout the land eating and vomiting…pulsating and raping innocence in the name of our holy cause. It is for blood and this world we call our very own.
He built this land and from his hands raised that mighty tower over mighty tower. Built on your bones like so much refuse littered in a pile…discord and confusion were to follow, but these are the means of antichrist. Temple of irony, tower of lies, cathedral vile now venomous, ambiguous waves of nausea and stark platitudes of man…you can call him many names, but it’s god in this realm. What were you thinking? Were you slaving in these pits to build his monument to callous antipathy without really seeing? Didn’t you feel anything or was that all over by then? Shaving and sprinkling your carcass with so much formaldehyde and ginger patchouli…only to wince when the axe came down…and then it was all over again until you looked within that silvered space once more….
Go up that highest hill again and burn your fleshly offering. It is the entrails of your own viscera. Your own hollow being you lived in zomby shambling. Cry above and drink this blood. You have cooked the flesh once more and a million cries will follow. It spread across the universe like the statically loud bang that brought the flesh from amorphous rock into unholy being and worship ripened with death’s stink.
You are his slave. He only wants what he had, but has now found maddenly unobtainable. To sleep without dreams…to be obliterated, but no matter how much death and blood it still is only wracking pain and sorrow…lies and spinning fear…to live and not sleep.
How many times? Is this the last? There’s nothing left to burn…I just want to go home, he said. I just want to find that peace. Is this the way out? Is this how it is all to end after all? You go home and no one’s there anymore. Only the sound of phantom footsteps that follow…. Mother and father murdered. The children in little pieces along the hall and in the basement…is this your end?
Cry you old man. Cry and bend a knee in servitude. Your master will betray you in the end. You knew it all along, but you bent to that ancient altar again and again. Cry those bitter tears before you rise again and come back to something you never thought would exist. Something grown up, yet child-like…innocently precise in wonder, wildness and…that’s it…something to look forward to after all…the moment of eternity like a pebble held in fists of sand. Deep down the sigh is nothing more than a breath of life. You live…again. You may find peace…but waiting for it all again…that speeding train…would be the end.
The end.
Again…
The end.
This poem first appeared on the Reveille website on October 11, 2017