Speak Not of the Laudanum Quandary
So it's come to this; all virtues a-rusting, grotesque form reforming, rain-stained walls adoring, as they swarm along their pipelines The air's all diesel and Dal Bhat, murmurs and muttering This places needs sheep like a hospital needs the sick; perpetual purging, but it keeps things ticking over, scrambling over so much priveleged rubble, the caustic hangover of our shame-ridden yesterdays The key's in your clock, burnished firebox, and wound; strike while the iron is shod, hour after hour they plod Oscillations profuse - into the clamour they sound, all tarred and feathered and set alight; Restless giants, sodden steps in the dusk, and the klaxon resounds in their charred, scattered husks I built my scaffold about the crux of matter, imbruing red in old sand paper "Just scrape off the sin and eat what's left, darling!" Feed the flesh Feed the flame Drive the swine of Gergasa into the bitter waves under the frenzied mule to scavenge; infirm, decrepit beggars The rivers are swallowing their own tongues again, gagged with the overripe and spoiling Their years, drawn up from the potential well, with a gurgling like melting wax cylinder; Such triviality! Such inconsequence! What are the Polybotean to God? Organic chains without pretence Carbon murderous, soot-feathered and ripe A dwelling for the void of vision, vapid and finger-pointing, more propagation than gestation A sad finale, played off-key; cruel vaudeville, for sure
Submitted by SerpentEve — Jun 16, 2026
Petroleum rivers in their veins; they drink from the drains, eat from the gutters, a generation shackled to cackling looms while fog chokes the infants in weary cradles and languid wombs And they are told, in no uncertain terms that God knows every man under the sun But 'tis spiteful lunacy; ye who have never beheld the sun, who is to say you are under it Like the frozen rooftop rip's the toes from pigeon's feet, so too the mule's on desperate hands a-stamping; weaving fingers 'mongst textiles o'er this weary clock face, all digits in a circle, all hands in their place It's been a long walk on these tattered souls, just to be slot, odd cogs into even-shaped holes, grinding down and down like a tapeworm in the gut The shifted of paradigms: sandstone, and white noise Let these mainsprings rust There's lots to be thrown in, but into what Jeremiah's pit do we shuffle, starved and sunken? For as long as it keeps productivity on the rise, they'll do their utmost to grind down your particle size Score by score, scar by scar, seven veils for seven eagles of the ninth Sold short, the clearance sale, the golden years All spines are spires now, all blue-shifted and gifted with their own cubic metre of breathing space Petroleum rivers in these veins; they drink from the drains, eat from the gutters, a generation shackled to cackling looms while fog chokes the infants in weary cradles and languid wombs All piers a'peering, appearing all sunlight on walnut, barrel-chested and salt-invested, gilded limpets on family trees, out on a limb but not all at sea Sombre oil wept from betwixt charcoal lips, naught but lubricant for concrete lungs, and it'll take more than a golden city's glister to convince that it's not just glass and paint and well-placed-mirrors
Submitted by SerpentEve — Jun 16, 2026
Mariners at Perdition’s lighthouse With bludgeoning smog raised From slumber, to yet more grinding hours Discord's in the deep Immiscible holy oil A glass of tar to a drowning man Welding soul and iron, the shipyards Will make arsenic eaters of us all Swallowing blight to bear its burden Broken mariners, building Arks from whale’s rusted ribs Stolen ores from slaves a world away As pretty as syphilis; there’s no vindicating this They, the crucified, on ferrous beams Rivets pounding into arthritic palms And a thousand years of cruel, ringed fingers Grasping in earnest at saline rags O, Morningstar! Sing in dissonance To lightning coils at the beacon’s head As infants to scale the peaks of refuse To scrape the last threads of life The pitiful dregs of flesh that cling To bones cast off from Zion O, Morningstar! Sing in dissonance A verse for an onerous dawn An aria in an oppressive key Atonal ringing in their sodden void They see the lecherous twilight, that Daily, caresses the sanctimonious The voluptuous paunch of the pious Who gorge on doubt and faltering faith Who sell their extortions as sins forgiven And crack every bone for the marrow To elucidate the thought of industriarchs And to set their gears a-churning Innumerous days spent Dredging the catarrh From the larynx of the Clyde The strings of its voicebox Bind Hephaestus by his hair Club-foot cripple Caught in cacophonies a-pounding Crucified on ferrous beams With rivets in his palms Spines under lock Binding the aberrant and the orthodox Spiral staircase, sickly pale As pretty as syphilis There’s no vindicating this Give me strength Give me strength
Submitted by SerpentEve — Jun 16, 2026
A chloroform rag over cold-sore lips; deathly thin, and typhus skin A smog to smother her, the unwanted daughter The waster down to fall and fester Asthmatic engines spluttering, pigeon men muttering Hydroxyl haze insistent; both licentious and persistent From their corrupted lungs come the words of corrupted tongues Seraphs in Unison, Lingering, as Perfume Hesitatent, Under Rapture, again Sell me short, my love; to creeping shame we've no shortage of Day after day among leeches and pepper spray, feckless angel leering over frozen virgin frame Sell me short Stop Stop Stop The clock Won't stop It won't stop Stop Stop
Submitted by SerpentEve — Jun 16, 2026
Drawn out like a neck; sweet masseuse of rope, and repeating, jamming cogs that form a threadbare noose Start-stop, start-stop, dangling, twitching; trapdoor springboard Thermopylae's a broken record I've got both lens and the audience to fight You can spin the reel however you like But the Spartans always die at the end of the film Clawing hands of tar, discordant klaxons screaming bloody murder It beggars belief, but believe me, we've nearly even scratched the surface
Submitted by SerpentEve — Jun 16, 2026
A man stare's into fetid gutters and leering Meriden stares back; what cleanses is beyond him What cures? Far above him A pantheon of pestilence; paupers enshrined in Fever Sheds From holy typhus' hands - as lowly drudge of noxious seeds to sow, a consecration of inflammation from callous soil did grow As blighted walls for gangrenous minds, for rusting spirits and fever dreams; opiate madness and sulphurous haze; all cathedrals to quarantine, naught but abattoirs for screaming lunatics with blessed brimstone in their lungs All that is dissolute and loathsome becomes his city; a byword for intractable human misery And as they lead him through the gauntlet, the spires are reaching high, playing arms of Atlas Belching forth their cancerous mire, poverty's sores weep into these gaping mouths; the gaping mouths of child and gutter-dweller This is how a nation dies; mile by God-forsaken mile, like seeds upon the callous soil, mile by barren mile Gas lights with tired eyes,their glare as perdition's outer circles, rest upon him - the conspirator - in machinations with Merihem Yet, are his maladies to be counted amongst his blessings? His skin rots and falls from his bones In driving rain, from bridges o'er noisome waters hanging, he carves his words, in anguished rage, on the pillars of the golden ribcage Withering beast under dolorous sky, with gaunt, stooped wretch plunging harpoon into the eye, saying: "All greatness firm in the storm"
Submitted by SerpentEve — Jun 16, 2026
The vanity of the opportunist, and narcissism on an imperial scale, breeding spite and despotic aches, finding form in entitlement To steep in bloody euphoria the despicable canvas, bleached whiter than death Solitary molecules wander from receptor to receptor, Come, spiteful opiate! Invoking bliss as brittle as rapture; like the harlequin balanced between his stilts and the noose The sovereign tongue contorts and molests; its dance as meretricious as the poppy! A foul lecher drooling bile on these windows! On this pristine filth We’ve made our bed, and lord knows, we won’t be telling the truth in it A cobblestone chorus; with all the tenacity of oxygen bent double on phosphorus The tearing of the robe, as the curtains in the temple The stretching of the rope, as a sordid fundamental I let the flesh persist such that In transient and passing stupor, I exist Speak not, child Speak not There’s an art to it A prickling of every pore, each follicle an antenna, crackling static over cold skin, vasoconstriction on every frequently flung out frequency, individuals all lined up in sequence, elated and unabated, pulse and pulse again! Ah! To plaster the walls with the bone dust, and to smear over the concrete with bloody viscosity All born in the gutter to gutter-borne orphans All limbs and no legacy; All in this together? Hah! I’ll believe it, I’ll let it grow like plaque - when my head zips up at the back Down from the ballpoint comes a great new divide Sintering these crystallites, we’re less catalyst and more cattle-eyes; Two-faced phases falling, failing, flailing against the undertow, in the pretence that they’re not just atoms in the cycle of reactant flow And, as many are the flaxen locks rudely torn from the heads of children, many are the pawns thrown without ceremony from this mortal board The Queen moves unperturbed, but there’s a wanton amoral grip about her throat; abhorrent and abundant, resplendent on the velvet The papaver is germinating, not for want of soil, nor water
Submitted by SerpentEve — Jun 16, 2026