of graves and the yellowed linen.
"Calamity of fate!" - the portents cry.
She longs to join the earth.
Until all is but an elysian field (beset with glistening urns).
A desolate, echoing cinerarium rattled by the winter wind.
Merciless, I raise the cup.
I beseech it be filled.
I am the celebrant in this rite of shrouds.
We abscond to ashes and dust occludes us all.


3. Desire (The Dawn & The Chrysalis)

If your embrace were a chrysalis.
I would weather callous frosts - or die inside.
A madrigal, slow-breathing.
Your pale shoulders and flow of hair.
Solitude, what have you done?
My lifeless fingers trace the surface.
For these lines exist in lithic memory.
In colonnades where light, weight, and form.
Shatter like a thousand breaking bones.
Above a sea of twisted limbs.
What have you done?
Fuck your beautiful world.
The doubt in your heart made no amends.
The doubt in your heart left nothing for me.
I often return to the frozen ground where I laid with you.
When I gaze across the fields I understand the beauty of dying leaves.
And why the dying trees reach to touch a faraway sun.
And why I have become a forlorn wreck of fleeting intangibles.
My better nature scorched in the crucible that is you.
I hate.
Yearn.
Despair.
And lust.
Desire, what have you done?
What have I become?
I am nothing.
I am nothing.
Nothing.


4. Canto XXXIV

[screaming]


5. Ruin

Falling, sightless, the final hours have passed.
The soul becomes flightless.
The silence of the grave, the evensong.
Bereft of form and void.
Deadlights dance in the sйance obscure.
And the damned lick the black tendrils of hastur.
Conjoined amidst the circles nine.
The prophecy of the soil and secret rites of the worm.
An ossuary of flesh amongst all our living tombs.
Crawling, limbless, through the pale valleys displaced of time.
Our lidless eyes forward to the ever-fixed mark.
This worm-web known as mortality.
A single, labyrinthine tier across the yawning abyss.
Whose walls are featureless and purchase - impossible.
And so begins the litany of the lie.
Scraping the precipice toward the slough of despond.
I have found strange purity in this oblivion.
Impending dissolution brings no pause.
Upon ashen splinters is my body - which is given for you.
I call the vermin to their feast, and the worms to paradise.


6. Celia

The body, a painting in abstract.
Contorted hues, framed by steel and tubes.
Reflection of youth and beauty.
Smashed, splintered, nothing.
Fragments, as words - meaningless.
Remnants of flesh - pallid, forlorn.
An object in this gallery.
Of living corpses and surrogate breath.
Begotten, the invalid.
In wreckage, and broken glass adorned.
Angles unkind, joylessly entwined.
This palette of ruin that Celia becomes.
The body, a study disfigured.
She is God's own art.
Contusion of youth and beauty.
Crushed, crippled, yielding.
Motion, as time - intangible.
The verdigris of subsequent decay.
Suffusing the sickroom, the wheelchair, the needles, the hours, the days.
Forgotten, the invalid.
Pristine the canvas, the certainty, the stain.
Flawless design, sorrowfully refined.
The fragile art of Celia is done.


7. Gethsemane

Scourged with whips, and thorn-crowned.
Bear your cross on the way of sorrows.
On these narrow streets your people leer and spit.
"Rome condemns you, Her gods condemn you!"
Stripped naked and bound with rope and iron.
Christendom dies with you on this hill in Judea.
And is reborn - crawling through the Calvary filth like flies on carrion.
Tetha malkuthak - your kingdom come.
Son of Mary, we share the cup of struggle and betrayal.
For your beloved of Earth revile me.
They tear the flesh of my palms in deposition.
And excoriate me without succor at the pillar of your church.
Their baleful assurances have become the Via Crucis.
Where my body is bloodied and my frail form broken.
They have paved my path to Golgotha with usury and deceit.
In Heaven as on Earth.
Salvation is famine, and faith - a hateful diadem.
I await revealing beneath a mantle of heavenly silence.
And to silence I shall return.
They raise their nails to my wrists and cast lots for my worth.
In their eyes I am the apostate.
They bring the judgment of Caiaphas and the mockery of Pilate.
They cast their derision - their damnation - as a spear into my side.
And in a lifetime's anguish it is accomplished.


8. Waters Of Quiet

[Instrumental]


9. Touching Eternity

Rise.
You promised life unending yet emptiness remains.
Fleeting traces of sheol.
Sutures bind the eyes and seal the mouth.
And the trocar's incision disembowels.
Around me they lay their hands in prayer.
Through me, they touch eternity.
Death is my religion.
As Lazarus, I rise.
Embalm the soul in darkness.
And cross the field of flies.
Rise.
I abhor you.
Reject you.
Lament you.
Absolve you.
Laid to rest, no flesh shall be spared.
Your kingdom's crown lies in rotting soil.
And your servants moulder in the earth.
Your salvation never was nor is.
It will not be again.
Death is my religion.
As Lazarus, I rise.
Entomb the soul in darkness.
And cross the field of flies.