Ride out
The light slurs and boils and breaks into my eyes.
Dawn pours molten gold across the sand.
The iron vultures screaming murder overhead slide like a knife into a crying land.
To take the shot? To kill or not kill? To close your eyes with a whisper or a bullet?
To spare a son, or lay him low?
The compass in my soul will guide me true, I know it.
It feels like summer has arrived, somewhere far away, across the poison sea.
It feels like the wind is singing songs full of promises tomorrow cannot keep.
Feels like summer has arrived…
Ride out, peacemaker. Ride out, oathbreaker.
Feels like summer has arrived...
Colossus
Too many suns in a splintered sky. Don’t shield your eyes, let ‘em burn you alive.
Gaze on Colossus, a desolate prize. It’ll live beyond you, and the spreading fires.
Bury your fear. (Extend your mangled hand.)
Shadow draws near. (Courage like a cloak.)
Stare it in the eye. (Don’t blink when it stares back.)
Old legend tells how a soldier died saving his love and their unborn child.
Watched by Colossus, frozen in time, their tale lives beyond us- what will we leave behind?
“And yet the fear takes root in the naked soul. The sand, the sky, and big birds with wings as wide as the sky, gaze down and watch, and wait for us to die.”
God will stop trying
If you stare long enough, you can see a star dying.
If you wait long enough, even God will stop trying.
In the dark of the night, just your will and a knife, you can dig the fear from your bones.
If you climb high enough, you can feel the air dissipate.
If you stand fast enough, even God is forced to wait.
In the dark of the night, just your will and a knife, you can dig the fear from your soul.
God will stop trying, no hand to guide us, no word to bind us, no end to strive for.
No fire to warm us when light is dying, the fountain dried up, God will stop trying.
Take heed and listen, your muscles screaming, the heavens watching, your heartbeat pounding.
For in the distance, your end is coming. Gather your might and stand up and fight it.
bone cathedral
Evil sundown, uncounted day.
Miles from village, an open grave.
Ash and steel, a week’s decay,
A lake of bones, splintered, unknown.
Silver in the sand draws my eye.
Dog tags wink in wilting light.
Diaz, A Pos.- I know this skull
From when it was alive.
Ice floods my veins, a sickening,
The stranglehold of fear enveloping.
I meet his naked grin, his eyeless gaze.
A veil of flies gives flesh to fleshless face.
No time to waste, no mark to leave.
The vultures will return, make meat of me.
I quickly clear a space, build a shrine,
Inside my mind, where none survived.
A Nameless Dread
Unfurl my wings and spread the sickness. A stench of sorrow that makes me ascend.
With God so long gone, I do what I can, and I’ll burn the whole world until it eats from my hand.
You pray in vain, a knife in your face. Sing me your song while I help you ascend a stair of bone.
To your everlasting home.
Born in the mire, suckled on dread. You named the nameless, raised it up from the dead.
A life so fragile, crimson thread, weed in the desert, king of the damned, prince of the dead.
(horror my hymnal, songs of the end, thrive on the fault line, drag you back in)
Turn your gaze into the east, there’s a comet crossing the sky.
A nameless dread, horizon glowing red tricks your eyes into seeing sunrise.
Gulp the air and drink the scent of your final hours alive.
A brittle bird crushed inside a fist, a fading dream of flight.
Follow life until its end, just a well that’s waiting to dry.
Pass a finger through the flame, pull it back unscathed.
Build your mandala of hope, it’s the cruelest joke of our time.
(the way is fear, swallowed in despair, consuming you from inside)
My name is dread.
awake at time’s end
Terrified of all my thoughts, jackal eyes in crushing dark.
Phantoms ride the howling wind trying to snuff the fire out.
Burn the witching hour with me, sing of timeless suffering
To keep the sky from closing in, to keep the hills from swallowing.
Rouse the dreamer from her sleep to walk the lonely dunes with me.
Sand to count until we die, stars to map a nameless sea.
When you first came I dreamed of snow, though I’d never seen it before.
A clear bell sounded in my soul, an echoing of what we were.
With war a long lost memory, a past sunk deep in distant grief;
War a future far removed, snowfall on the jagged peaks.
War is riding on the wind, war will soon be swallowing.
War will snuff the fire out, wed us to the earth again.
God, demon, or only a man? Try, fail to kill me again.
Bled, eaten, reborn of the sand; try, fail to kill me again.
Hell, Eden, awake at time’s end. Try, fail to kill me again.
Crawl, scrape, blister and beg. Try, fail to kill me again.
Burn out the heart! (From ash grows life.)
Bring down the stars! (The seed survives.)
Drown her in sand! (The sand provides.)
Rip off her wings! (The swallow’s flight.)
the silver lining
The silver lining of every shroud, stifled sunlight through mushroom clouds.
I’ve wept for strangers, I’ve buried friends. I hear them crying upon the wind.
And I am nothing, yet here I stand. And I am no one.
I am beginning and I am end. Forgotten specters will ride again.
the swallow
And as the sand settles and blows away a dream forgot in passing…
And as the silent sea calls us to our graves… a soul sings alone.
Into the breaching night, we ride away, bearing the spoils of war.
Can you feel the hoofbeats? Can you hear them coming?
Above the swallow pierces through the wind. Her eyes can see through distant fires burning in the sand.
And although she can see where every road will go, still I know they all end in sorrow and alone.
Above the chasm, the mortal toil, the skin that sloughs away into lakes of irradiated oil,
Above the screams for home that bounce off heaven’s dome, the mouths that shape their pain in a language she’ll never have to know;
Above the swallow soars light upon the wind.
Her heartbeat whispers fast and free of where her flight began.
And though only it knows all the miles she has flown,
every dream is of this moment; every moment, she is home.
clearing the sand
Where the mountain hides the plain, and the city of the shifting sands,
Wandering spirits of the slain shriek on evening winds.
The soft light of the morning keeps the passes lit. I fell into a stillness, it came rushing back to me.
Shackle memory to the sun and chase it through the sky.
Release attachments one by one, forget them as they die.
Cast rocks into the ocean, feel the tide again. Lose track of all the moments, clear the sand again.