NIGHT THE SECOND (A LANDSCAPE POPULATED)
All the clues are there in the symptomatic madnesses. Here they come willingly.
Lurching dressed in the horrors of those Germanic artists driven mad by the scent of the rot of death and the acid blue veins of ergot. Give us this day our daily dead. My very bonnet badge: clan mother belladonna and mad dancing.
The restless limbs rippling,
A hot wind, a sirocco over the waterless sands
Of dried, flaking skin, a glowing leprosy,
A holy transformation back to earth.
Tropanes needle and embolden. The Golden Mean, the Fibonacci, eroded by endless rains so the weighty cliffs of selfhood grow sodden and at last liquify collapsing, stone to mud and root and revealed bones, the sunken bells already deep in salt silt haunted – the unblinking cynic eye of dragons counting the too few millenia of tall brains swaggering top heavy and profligate as if all were truly made for them alone.
Chiselled are the precise gargoyles vomiting rain,
Pissing spouts of life.
The clues are all there, my dears,
They are so close so as to
Raise tiny neck hairs with their breath.
So moist are their lips, my dears,
So darting their electric tongues,
Their opaque eyes staring still,
An inward crouch, a search for vowels
In a sea of consonants.
Only evil comes of elucidation. Eat it all up. Revealed are the shadows in light to be answers.
Clear-cut the butterfly-winged angels come straight from sucking the nectar of God, will drive the penitential into burning buildings and the queues of forbidden passions will be kebabbed and skewered for each chimereal constructed thing. Stare long enough. Turn not away. Given signs and clues and testings. For how many millennia have the lists been corrupted? Turn away upstream or downstream. The same song.
Even angels wither there, becoming demons.
Self-mutilated, gnawing on bones of certainty.
Marking aeons in long, shallow scratches, muttered lists,
Reasons why and why not.
The shelved, locked-out passions, the dirty shameful things. Power piled up, an unused compost that can never rot lest fed, forgiven or owned once more.
It ferments, ignis fatuus, Hand of Glory.
Abhorrence and disgust,
To look elsewhere and forget,
To disinherit, to deny.
Not an easy thing to remain sane and honest. Not a habit that is cultured or condoned. A dangerous device is this difficult conjuration. Likely to consume as consummate. There may or may not be maps, may or may not be instruction. No consensus from a millennium of points of view whispered into the rhythm of the blood.
Be wary of the insistent ones.
The ones offering sense.
White noise as their echoes build up.
White noise becoming stillness.
A perfect inaction,
suspended, turning slow,
turning slow,
cocooned and waiting.
—
simonhlilly 