Knives, Labyrinths, Mirrors

Dust and dusky archways stooped in the low smoking sundown/Red thrum of insects, quiet street beyond time-dappled with ruin/Pattern of the frost upon his open lips/Lying, hands outstretched, back shattered by a crippled/Horse, eyes whirling, writhing in a thicket of mesquite/Till you wake with the heaving of its pulse and the terrible certainty of its existence/A secret and subtle Judas/Wayward, grasping nail/Coiled without intent, compassion, malice, will or reason/A beckoning window, a crumbling staircase falls/Such a small spine that lames the mount/Ground’s rush to greet the rider/From a womb of stillness and ashen grit/Its birth portends infinite endings/Sunstroke, hunger, nest of hornets/Reeling at the yawning precipice/Frail lattice of causality, glass cold against your teeth/Gazing out the door across the hill, into the great howling grayness beyond/Astride a rotten tree hanging over a flooded embankment/Its branches dip the churning darkness and slip into the wash/We slip into the roaring wash. — “This is the great reward. Maybe this is the only reward. Maybe this is the final purity all ringed with filth.”

Submitted by Morgoth — Apr 26, 2025

Moaning winds and burning exhaust/Desiccated husks on hot pavement/The wreckage of life deferred/A ledger of accusation/Of cicadas and dust, copulation and opulence in the breath of madness/We, the excrement of new gods and primal fears/Terribilis set locus iste; hic domus dei est, et porta caeli/So long as you endure/Ever-warping enormity/There is no courage or joy/A chaos of form, poisoning all futures, polluting all past/The great reward of filth and splendid collapse/Wrath and revulsion, our cathedral is burning. — “Esta Ciudad (pensé) es tan horrible que su mera existencia y perduración, aunque en el centro de un desierto secreto, contamina el pasado y el porvenir y de algún modo compromete a los astros. Mientras perdure, nadie en el mundo podrá ser valeroso o feliz.”

Submitted by Celtic Frost — Apr 26, 2025

Dragged across a carpet of knives slick with marrow/Blood pooling black in formless void/A tombworld of rusting arms locked in frigid lust/In the maw of restless and beguiling night/Great unmaker, face leering from every mirror/A reliquary carved in skin/What confinement more repulsive than eternal life?/Crushed in the square under a mob of torches, wrists extended/Shackled with craven pieties and desperate psalms/In this world of the wheel/Of the rack, the crown and the axe/Of brother turning ever cruelly on his sister/This oubliette, cold lungs of a breathless god/Narcissus in a pool of dust/Exquisite corpse, ragged husk, gilded and burning still/As tongues severed from gaping jaws/Lips carved in mockeries of flesh/Divorced from the divine/A rapture of ignorance and splendor/The smell of petrichor and brass/Bile and butter, rancid and black/Of orchids, asphalt, mildew and semen/Of failure flensing the pride from man forever. — “‘I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.’ ‘That part of me is gone. Working and not succeeding—all my…failures have left me…I just don’t…care.'"

Submitted by Cyberwaste — Apr 26, 2025

Crawling in thirst upon the edge of a vast and barren shoreline/The spines of a hundred keels arrayed in supplicant posture/A receded mirror curdled in our noxious reflection/There has been no water here for many lifetimes/A trail of vermillion blooms in the dust weave toward the skyline/A bloody skin and a line of tracks in the unblinking salt/This wretched dismal hole of man forever warring/Each screaming, lonesome birth a fistful of windblown sand/A brazen bull/Victim and torturer/Mouth full of blood/Lungs full of ash/Whirling—writhing—crushing—joining/A squirming mass of dogs/Their jaws locked around each other’s throat/A hydra with ten billion faces/Ripping at its own belly, clutching its adversary till its last breath is crushed out of its entrails/The sins of the father visited tenfold upon the son/Let them speak of you: “Rejoice, for he has wrought this world’s cremation.” — "Hell has no limits, nor is circumscribed; for where we are is Hell, and where Hell is, there we must be."

Submitted by Lake of Tears — Apr 26, 2025

Haze lifting, the shifting AM static/Awaken to taillights melting in the fog/Vision snaps to a shadowed and expressionless figure/Flickering and looming black beyond the glass/Hands suddenly aware/On the wheel, rigid and swerving to the shoulder/Shake, smoking and helpless in the roadside dark/A rusty sob, or a laugh like bricks on pavement/Same wretched glimpse/Spiral into nightmare/Fettered to a corpse/A tether of atrocity/With traitor’s feet slouching on toward Bethlehem/Stealing coastward in unconscious hours/Gripped by magnetic impulse in reluctant flesh/Scaled, stygian muscle churning and thrashing on a hook/Bilious glow shimmering/Over the trees, neither dawn nor sunset/Foaming surf in clammy fingers/Clutching at uncertain earth/The dream will repeat/Fettered to a corpse/The afterbirth of a plagued and quaking cosmos/Slither out in its convulsions, trickling into ether/The sermon inscribed in our marrow, it is not god/An oddly-shaped silhouette and the shivering of a severed hand/Nailed to a tree. — “Et quid amabo nisi quod ænigma est?”

Submitted by Infernal Flame — Apr 26, 2025

Creeks of filth in muted canyons/Starving coyotes and unsmiling heat/Scrabbling over vicious crevasse/A melting roadway of shimmering black tar/Pinnacle and terminus/Devolution and ataraxy/Beyond the fence, the mouth of the cave/Its stony gullet a prefiguration of hell/Forever waiting, ceaseless and unburied/Airless hexagrams repeating, unfolding/Years tallied by nails in a cross of iron/As this sanctuary turned sarcophagus/A place of time curled like paper in a furnace/A labyrinth, a warning, a monument mortared with ash/Children’s remains curled beneath the images/Of a sickly cloud blooming bright in the desert/A proud banner faded to pale surrender/Eagle’s talons, Noah’s branch and fate’s arrows of holy war. — “We march in spite of Hell, we do—Atrophy, Entropy, and Proteus vulgaris, telling bawdy jokes about a farm girl name of Eve and a traveling salesman called Lucifer. We bury your dead and their reputations. We bury you. We are the centuries.”

Submitted by Pestilence — Apr 26, 2025