loathsome murk, drawing me into taint,
trailing off into the black mire yet again.
vine-brother, i hear your leaves trembling,
what poison seeps from you now?
clotted earth webs your lashes;
when i scrape it loose, the ground cracks,
your breath curdles me backward,
into the ditch’s gullet.
hands like tarnished winches,
i wrench, stagger, cling,
yet your seepage slicks the corbelling,
brine of iron thickening in the throat.
i thrash like a rabid,
limbs cadging against sodden turf,
nails serrated on the gristle-clotted earth,
and still you scream,
your wither drips sicklier now,
i see it contort, i see the murids writhe
through the filigree of air.
crows; oscillating, tacit, assay my hands,
perpetually assay, quantifying
how fealty decays in my fingers.
falter not, the fault feeds me yet, they caw.
vine-brother jumps into the cracked loam,
hell opening like funeral pyres beneath him.
he sags, sap-wet and ***** with earth’s grit,
tears mingling with the dust as they leak from his cracked lips.
his hand, crawler’s cold, scrabbles for mine;
i, slack-jointed, pulled into the churn of mire,
find myself dragged into loathsome murk.
🕒
