Crystalline Exhaustion

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

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

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

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”

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

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