Excerpts From a Dread Liturgy

Stirring beyond an endless gulf of apprehension / Bent into the lurid autopsy of a mirror / Pupils dilate, malign and unfamiliar / As an arrangement of flies on a vacant windowsill Lips dripping with bile and saliva / Hands that burrow, burrow through organ and tumor Our bodies like a crust of roaches / Clot the earth’s folds, rustling and filthy in this slowly-filling well of depravation / For the love of god, will you not lower me the rope? Am I throat or the hands at the garrote? / A cyclic sacrament / Rejoice in the blessings of misery and death Are we not lain under the hill of Prometheus? / Fallen upon the dagger, “thy handle turn toward my hand?” The scar that precedes the falling of the blow / The open grave which prefigures every birth / I am the hand that wounds, I am the arch tower of guts and the arrow buried forever in its breast.

Submitted by Grave666 — Apr 26, 2025

An insect lands, black and ugly / On the cool expanse of her forehead / Ashen legs dangle, shoeless / From the rippled shade of a culvert / The sagging trestle groans overhead / And melts away into the slinking fog A whirling tumult of rats squirming and tangled / Enraptured, all fucking and whelping / Squealing pink and twisting crown of worms, beckoned by a cool and nerveless hand / Curled in a curious gesture Crippled Athena, spring from your headless grave / Burst from the loins of a careless word / Foul golem, echo of an echo / A gut-fear seeping into daylight Flawed in every facet / False in every aspect A peeling skull / A hall of mirrors / A twisting scaffold / Its drapery degloved Fraying and endless wound / Meager and threadbare quilt of daybreak pulled over the all-abiding nightmare / A place where time revolves and eddies in a filthy slough, to lap forever against her milky scalp Compelled, as if drawn upon a silent string / The insect stirs again, and crawls toward her eye — wide now, uncomprehending — and it begins to lay its eggs.

Submitted by Nargaroth — Apr 26, 2025