Susurrations; syncopated voices clamour desolately Incantations; reverberation drowns the torrent Of prognosticating tongues Echoes of fractious empires once renounced Shattered and razed beneath the lunar-sundered crown By hands bloodied and broken Words and deeds unwrought in the death of life Embittered against self-shorn legacy Consumptive and stricken down Granular opiated silence Ruination ‘cross a million lifetimes Falling in splinters and shavings of fractured destiny Exultant, carrion-gloating as reckoning enthralls None but Vessel remain, to witness bear, of the thriving storm Disciples, in revelrous wanton as the starlight gutters out Engorged and insatiable Bereft in the chasm of Vessel’s maw Adrift in a wine-dark future of rubble and ruptured plains Anchored in scouring nothingness, mocking barrenness, an empty fane Beholding, benighted in this torment of harrowing barren sprawl Vestigial future, inchoate, the pulse of infinity’s gallow-call I wander, inconsolably doomed to perennially roam In lightless lands, no hope to hand Tears of bracken and withered ocean’s loam I, the Vessel, unmade and squandered Awaken in nightmares sutured from Vessel’s torment Reprehensible flame Canker, the festering malodorous, of once-nothingness Excoriating pain And folding, smashed sightless In this moment of shimmering; radiance blooms A lingering ruin; decimates; the crush of the solar-blighted gloom My words uttered and spoken My soul seared by the breaking, lambent light Conscripted, to march eyeless in self-denying agony Abrupt and reductive, the burnishing sunlight’s howl In ruination eternal, I am bound.