Death, the here long after!
Or do I mean the long here after?
I don’t really know…what a strange thing death is.
Consciousness is like a stream they say
Never really believed them until now
For my thoughts do run like a river (Styx?)
Right through the valley where the shadow of Death walks
That’s right…Death doesn’t ride.
He ******* walks like the rest of us
Blistered feet, soles of the dead can get blisters
And they do! I’ve seen them!
And at the bottom of their souls lies desire
Desire for an answer, for purpose
Never content even when an answer does find them, finds us
We keep on looking
Keep on walking
We waste our lives as worrying wanderers
Walking hand in hand with Death as we realize…
We’re already dead

Feel the burn of desire scorch your insides
Feel the warmth from the spilling of seed
My darkness is deep within you

Setting out on this campaign of lust,
Our bodies tangle, indulging in the pleasure of the flesh

Eat me up, swallow me whole,
As I fill myself with you
We are ouroboros

Sleepless, lost and wandering
Wondering what it all means
Beg the heavens for an answer
But silence is the only response from an overcast sky
The chain slackens and the cage drops
Cerebral bars block the paths of elated reflection
Contentment occasionally slips through the clefts
But is instantly devoured by sharks of agony
Grief, heartache, passion and sorrow
The artists toolbox
Blood, sweat and tears (fears)
Causation of our desire to die
Is what gives our work life

Drowning in a sea of disappointment
Swept away by the undercurrent
Into the depths of my own hatred
The weight of my heart
Set in stone and cast in steel

Kick me down
Complete submission
I reached for the stars as a last desperate
attempt to be part of the light

But you extinguished the sun
And you swallowed the moon
And by the time that I had finally made it
The stars had all died

What is the void?
Nothingness manifested?
There can’t really be such a thing…
How can there be nothing?

It’s impossible.

You can’t fault me for having trouble wrapping my head around an idea as intricate and deeply infinite as nothing. From a young age, we’re taught that everything, even empty space, is created from protons, neutrons,  subatomic particles…

Empty space is always made from something else.

Some describe the void not as a place, but instead as spiritual enlightenment and/or liberation. As detachment from everything. Some describe entering the void as the moment one realizes that if you try too hard to understand then you will miss the point; as the moment where the student realizes that he will never be able to anticipate his masters surprise attack, so, instead of being anxious he accepts his inability to know; as the understanding that holding on is suffering and letting go is freedom.

There is no way to truly talk about the void, about emptiness, because there is nothing tangible to be expressed in words. And yet, our curious human minds are so fixated on using dialogue to try and articulate this commodity.

Words will always fail.

Even if we could wrap our heads around this idea of emptiness, this complete and total lack of anything (comfort, love, hate, despair, joy, happiness, agony(all pieces of this complicated fabric known as human existence)) we would descend into the deepest and darkest of melancholies. The sudden moment of realization that non-being and being are one and the same and that the only thing separating the two is the awareness of being aware and the unawareness of being unaware would be too much to endure. The weight of realizing that nothing is everything, that we are 0 (placeholders for nothing (the extinction of our species before a return to nature untainted imminent)) would prove to be the strongest link of all in these shackles of existence.

What is the void?

Maybe it’s best not to ponder this any further.

Scream into the darkness
Without a sound
Weakling
Powerless miscreant

Buried by ash
And trampled by a thousand footsteps
A thunderous roar rips through the night
My desire to reconnect is devoured
By my craving for...

Subterranean hedonism

Exhausted from the surface
I burrow into fantasies of sunken darkness
I have tried to blend into the world
But people continue to dissapoint me

Bones ground to ash and thrown to the wind
My last burials rites
I had hoped it wouldn't come to this
But there is no hope...there is only me

I walk with weary eyes
Tired of seeing, no longer willing to hear
My head spins from the smoke of your conflagration
Burn me down from the inside out
Lungs of ice trap the filth
Make sure the essence becomes my own
I try to scream but cough out words of rancour
A whirlwind of smoke and embers
My ashes block the sun
Nothing can grow here

Rage
Followed by fear

Blank expression
Abandoned voice
Traceless imprint
Jaded enthusiasm

Scream into the void
Preach your poison gospel
Fear fills your frame and flows through your veins
Anxiety is your life blood

You crippled, broken beast
You pathetic excuse for a man

This is not me
You are not I
I live, ready to drink the sweet nectar of life
You forsake it, spitting in the face of altruism
This is not me

A crippled, broken beast
A pathetic excuse for a man

So many others crave the life you so readily condemn
Anxiety is your life blood
Two egos trapped in the same vessel
I owe myself life
Yet all you know is silence

Nothing to feel
One foot in the grave
Tired and weak
Let go of all dreams

Sleepless
Tired
Dying
Extinguish

Days never end
Mustn't all life someday fade?
Meaning(less)
Empty and cold, I am

Sleepless
Tired
Dying
Extinguish

Biding my time till Void I do become
Dissonant waves carry my husk through rivers of time
In the waters of Nihil, grim hopelessness ahead
Take comfort in knowing that all life must end

Sleepless
Tired
Dying
Lifeless
Extinguished

Darkness, and only darkness. Certainly nothing darker than darkness (is there even anything darker? aside from the darkness inside all of us?). Certainly nothing. But whatever is here, for something must be here, hidden behind the dark blankets of nothingness (there is always something), is something ancient, something forbidden. Maybe even serpentine, as it tries to kiss the air but only speaks in tongues.

It's something heavy, oppressive, something thick and viscous that keeps me from fully following this fleeting feeling and from fulfilling the folly of man.

For I stay away. I do not enter the cave. I do not see its maw, this serpentine…something. But I can feel its maw, tongues whispering temptations, but this sheep is not a sheep. I fell out of the herd a long time ago, no shepherd has brought me here to this cave from my dreams. Except this is no dream, because a dream is something distant, unattainable, borderline metaphysical. But I am here, and this is now. And this now is a now that I hoped never to have to confront. I am unworthy of Poseidon's judgment, and besides Poseidon, I am unworthy of myself (that is, if you choose to believe in the 'self' (but again, that is entering the realm of the metaphysical (and this is not meta, but it is physical))).

Air from aquatic lungs keeps me from asking the big question that is on my mind but mostly in my soul.

'Why me?'

But even if I could breathe, and even if I weren't scared of asking, scared of the answer…scared of Poseidon, (shouldn't I take comfort in his trident? In it's ability to pierce multiple tongues? To provide some kind of antithesis to this serpentine offering (if you could really call it an offering?)…comfort found in metaphysics has already been contemplated (did you forget?) This is no dream, and Dionysus is certainly not here, celebrating is out of the question.)

Maybe it's forbidden? Not Dionysus, and not a celebration of the spirit of man (though it certainly seems far away) but instead an answer, if an answer did indeed exist.

Enlightenment proves elusive as the light that was meant to prove elevation is smothered by the present darkness presented by my slithering friend. Though make no mistake, he (or it?) is not my friend. The only friend I need is oxygen, and my friends are indeed present, but are rendered voiceless in the sea of white noise, hopelessly outnumbered. For every one oxygen there are two hydrogen, and that means two less chances of ever knowing why.

'Why me?'

And while I scream from the depths (and the depths do indeed scream back (louder than I can bear to tolerate)) others are left screaming into the void, hoping, begging for a response.

But my words never reach them, and their isolation is never justified. In an attempt to find harmony in a chaotic universe, they hurl themselves over the wall of life's edge. We were born from darkness, we will return to darkness.

Once again;

'Why me?'

Why everyone but me? we hear from the shadows. And I say we because hydrogen and oxygen have accepted their differences and lungs can only scream for so long before they take everything you give them. And what I give them is what they've craved all along.

I breathe in the darkness. I breathe a breath that has been breathed a thousand times by a thousand different voices in a thousand different tongues. And as I inhale, I realize…that which is forbidden is never truly gained.

For the serpent now slithers in me.

From darkness I was born. To darkness I have returned.

Breath escapes from failing lungs
Withheld and yet withdrawn
Spirit ascends from hollow body
Leaving husk behind

The breaking of cosmic chains
Disguised as extinction of the flesh

Essence drifts through ether
Lost amongst the wonders of creation
Untethered traveler
Escaping the disgrace of dying stars

Relinquished life
Acquired release

Liberation of the body
Immunity of the spirit
Elevation of the mind
Alleviation of torment

By early mornings light
Shadows disperse
Run for cover to the dark roots
Subterranean refuge
Safety in the cold earth
Mother Nature’s bedrock womb
Necrosis of light gestates
Rests its weary, starless mind
Gloom retires, lies in wait
Twilight beckons the return

In darkest forests where magic hides
In deepest oceans with stranger tides
In vast canyons where the eagle flies
Exists a love that never dies

Through dense fogs and cloudy skies
Burns a fire that shines so bright
And in that light I see your eyes
Where our love could never die

In these forests we'll reside
In the oceans we'll own the tide
On the backs of eagles we will fly
To these lands, where love never dies

In these lands we will reside
I will be yours and you'll be mine
I will love you till the end of all time
And our love will never die

Birthed from the mire
Of pyroclastic grey
Entropy reigns supreme

Cracks in creation
Beckon the thaw
Veins of inferno clean

Ashen rains bury the land
Show where life has once been

Swallow all life
Diminish all light
This is the end of all things

Days pass by
Monotonous
Black and white
Life happens all around
But never to me
World experienced
Through waking coma
Nervous system weak
All feeling almost gone
Until I look back
Through old notebooks
Re-experience trace memories
Of who I once was
Who I used to be
And maybe still am
Reading these old writings
I feel more of my old self slip away
But I smile
For it means
I’m still here

Through boundless eons of black chasms of time
Stygian waters have hidden a secret dark
For something lurks far beyond the threshold of ocean and sky
Something swims deep down in the dark heart of Adam's Ale
It's hulking mass creeps through the ages with crystalline eyes
Always searching, always waiting
Through vast, vacuous gloom and murky brine
Yellow-emerald light signals the arrival of the Gaping Void
Lighteater, Purveyor of Doom with voidmight abound
Cosmic sustenance; celestial bodies on which he will feed
An alignment of dead stars will beckon the ascent
A new age of perfect midnight will begin
And there will be a terrible reckoning
When terror rises from the deep

When the sun has gone to sleep
And ghosts have had their time to creep
Imps and goblins awaken to
Do the things that monsters do

Into the dream I fell, a dream of darkness, strobing lights showing fleeting glimpses of stoic faces, red glowing eyes emanating heat and a bright aural glow. Creeping, lingering, screaming, screaming children, faces floating freely, freely floating faces...the dream makes no sense, but as I descend into sleep, so do the lights and mass swirling vortexes of the abysmal void behind me? In front of me? Hands reach out from the black grabbing and pulling, I scream for them to leave but it attracts "them"... voices from the other side... I run slowly, through black as thick and repressive as water, displacing darkness to make way for more darkness. And yet again I am afraid, scared, terrified. Hands turn into tendrils sliding and slithering through the black mass. Pure misanthropy, panicked absence of thought, kick, f(l)ail, cut, scream, louder louder LOUDER. No one hears and destiny never knocks, this is my fate but now I am not here, where could I be? Will this nightmare ever end? It has only just begun, somewhere new, individual thought patterns; feet move, legs move, hands all working in harmony, perfect in thought but executed like a puppet from a string, where am I? Clean smell of water, water has a scent and it smells like blood, but it is still blue and I am still lost, endless ocean crashing waves upon sea caves, silhouette against the light, who is she and where am I? Look around at sandy beach with cliff side walls, how will I ascend, or should I dare? Do I dare taunt the silhouette by running away without running towards? I try to breathe but water is my air, water is my air, I am laying on the seabed, tide pulled me in, the silhouette floating beside me; take a step back. How and when did I take the plunge?The dream still makes no sense. Did she call me with her siren song, the silhouette most certainly her, but who oh WHO is she? Terrified, paralyzed of water, irrational fear, I cry for help but breathe it in, she comes to me, hears my swan song but sees me as a phoenix. Takes me to the surface, to the limit so I may fly away, breathe breathe BREATHE! Back again to sandy beach with cliff side walls, sets of prints in the sand of all the other lost souls who lost their way, I am just another soulless elegy in the monologue of dreams, so I decide to explore my own reason into being, being what, being who? Is it time to leave? I only just got here... This dream still makes no sense.

Draining pools of blackened filth
Tiny pockets amass
An ocean of sludge to horizons end
Stone heart is cast away
Descends to the bottom

New blood bursts forth
Seeps into empty spaces
Mortar for the soul
In this wounded way
Ascend to begin again

You sit awake at 5 AM
Unable to sleep from the heat
A mind burdened by desire and ambition
Blurry dreams that are out of focus
Impossible to see for the eyes that have lost their vision
Out of touch from the heart beat slowing down
You’d mourn the loss of your being
But tears can’t heal the dying
And pain, no matter how brilliant, can’t bring back the dead
You climb back into your coffin
Next to your fellow corpse in the bed of hope
And you realize
Sometimes it’s better to let it die