"The Window"

 

The sun was in decline over the horizon’s eager maw
When there opened a window adjacent to my soul
And hiemal drafts swept in rivulets through my veins
A voice spoke a greeting in foreign, repulsive syntax
With coarsely articulated threats I could not parse
Until quiet meditation wed gnosis with dawning horror
As I beheld Death enthroned upon the infernal apex
That beguiled the spirit with oblique falsehoods
That when believed, embroiled the mind in throes of perdition
And hurtled the senses to the bleakest bitter cavern
Swallowing with rapturous envy the remnants of hope

And so it was that I came to be as the faintest vessel
As the darting shadows at the corners of the eyes
Disincorporating in atoms now verminous and vile
Thrown with disparate sensations into heinous realms
Beset by turbid channels of mercurial static
That neither stem from nor lead to any fluvial source
But from which I must drink that which cannot slake thirst
It was there madness wrote itself like an endless equation
Composed of numbers wildly bent and of ill definition
That thronged around my pallid, screaming remains
Taunting in malevolent, reverberating tones

“There is nothing more to be,” they declared,
at intervals with wisps of cacophonous laughter
“That which you were, never truly was
For the universe is a mouth that cannot feed
Gaping in vain at a dark knowledge that cannot be digested,
for it is enshrouded in roiling glacial waves of pitch black
Incessantly dousing the final desperate embers of life,
which fades upon a craquelured canvas shorn of stars
And thereupon lay your discarded mask of flesh
With barren expression and voice bereft of joy or wonder
Now but the merest piece of entity ensorcelled by damnation
The sum total of parts once amalgamated only by cruelest happenstance
Until the unfathomable depths of truth unto your thoughts were rendered”

When the voices stopped speaking I awoke in my body
Hushed, bewildered flutterings of despair prising my lips
And so it is now that I contain the terrible wisdom of Apophis
In every waking glance toward the nefarious corridors of Hell
That forever linger at the trace of every wind and every sound
Like a prophecy insidious and twisted in its inevitability
And no quietude can reach these ears that attend at the periphery of reality
Nor is peace beheld in these eyes that avoid the errant, creeking taps
Upon the glass of each reflection that stares with hateful envy at the life it fascimiles
The sun no longer rises over the desolate tundras of the material
And the sleep into which I desperately descend is void masquerading as reprieve
The axioms of ruin take hold; I will never awaken again