The Anthem of Decay: Prologue – The worship of graves

Ask yourself, Amanita; “Will you drink,

Join in with your raging centaurs

As they play with their victims’ heads,

Or will you wait for the lightning strike,

The insemination by the Divine?”

She, etched in gold, does not answer,

Her face turned towards Gethsemane.

I move to the darkening window.

By the dull light of a dying star

I view my multi-dimensioned face;

It is not mine, this line my father’s,

That my mother’s, these their forebears’,

Spiralled cords tracing back to each birth,

And I conceived that the dead may live,

My fractals frantic with the burden to come,

Its sentence hardening even as I slipped from the womb,

And I, at the centre of the centre of the centred world,

The azimuth that flows through the bed of every sleeper…

This moment, she says, hold this moment.

I cannot; cackling at my back

The lambent ghosts invite me into the glass,

Each refraction of me freezing,

Burying me under broken ice;

I stand witness to my stained birth, my rebirth,

My DNA cursed with the aspirations of my father.

The centaurs begin to circle…..

Wait, she says, the rock is softening

And you will ascend into your own.

I cannot; death smiles, beckons me –

Above us another star, unmourned, fades -

And having supped, I slip on

The waxed mask, begin to dig my grave,

My back buckled by the North Wind,

The Earth soft after the night rain,

The welcoming maw warm, offering hope of peace.