Woe to the naked city!
Woe to the bloody city!
Woe to the barren city!
The constellations had mouthed and mimed of such a body. The body of a city fissured then remade whole but shattered evermore internally. Heat between the cracks in the fields. The great grand wife, wedded on Sinai slain and murdered, wronged and re-animated. His bare feet trudged through the naked breasts of Jerusalem, and his nostrils quivered faintly as he felt the barren wombs of the bloody city crawl to life again. Jerusalem was always born again in night's sultry crib of bone. Woe to it all, the marriage had long been spoiled.
He came thrusting through the night with a pale light, and through an arched, open doorway, he stole into a house that was was open to him.
And lo, infernal heat tore through his skin. Passages of his own hell were being carved within his innards. Upon the next floor, he saw death and the bones that death had laid waste to, all in heaps and columns and lines upon the floor. Taut bones regarded him with the sunken fires of life drowned in the gaping voids of their sockets, each step across the floor giving each skull a small jolt. They shivered at the feel of the warm firelight he carried. The dead shuddered. They liked it colder.
Their finger bones scattered, fanned across the wastegrounds, reaching in pride for the weight of their own sacrifices.
Passing slow and smooth through the narrow corridors, he came to a floor where the hooves of a dark goat were steeped roughly at the jaws of a door that awaited him. Inches had been revealed of the room's keeping beyond, for someone had already wandered here before. A slow and low gust of air passed through the hall. It turned some bones like the red lion's sulfuric mane in the hands of that primordial queen whose crown is the looping eight of infinity. The winds of time dead to eternity's immensity. Interlaced with the unwedded skeletons strewn haywire across the floors, there were weddings amidst the death, and suffering in the pleasure of the honeymoon in the darkest night of a more universal death unwanted and unaccepted by the acolytes of no tomorrow. There were things at all times happening beyond and beneath him, perhaps simultaneously. Passing through the door, he ignored the cosmic orgy of bacterial bodies, at all times colliding and sexing the living essence. The strongest to merge and fuse with. A race of proverbial births at all times birthing unto themselves the eater of their own days.
Legs and calves founded on stars were open for who knows how long, the golden womb blank as a clockface unto the incessant armageddons that climbed teetering and lathered in the baptism of its own generational slaughter. The sibling pair, extinction and birth from the same gaping wound, tethered against each for the eons they passed in rivalry. Birthing is extinction.
Stepping through the door, he felt the warm and soft ground beneath sink, and, as his torch illuminated the way, he saw, all around him, laying in a disarray of tangled torsos, an orchard of the naked dead. Figures void of expression or facial features below him, all stripped of hair and naked as marble. His bony feet felt the sunken flesh below him give way, and the bodies that slept all around him, heaped upon each other, arms wrapped in knots, bare and their flesh rubbing against flesh, their sallow limbs stretching long across the unlit room. No flowers bloomed from their slimy flesh. And they were all flesh, he could feel no weight in that skin he waded. He struggled to balance himself, and felt often long and hoarse breaths escape the faceless visages who buried themselves amongst each other. They were curdled upon each other's branched limb, a hyrda of unashamed nakedness, each with their members leaking life into the black where there could be no life save for the existence of finality which ran through their pneumatic bodies like the grand, licked fingers of the lanterman choking out the sultry light whose pole dance was eternal and without audience. It was as if death had won, and was never conquered.
It was the spring of their rot, and he swooshed his flaming light to reveal a tree of their naked bodies. Branches of faces, and a trunk of torsos all flesh, all pink and sallow meat. From the boughs of this nightmare tree hung the fruits of this dead orgy. With his eyes he reached to pluck luscious carmine lips, staggered and open, soft breaths pulsating from the fingerless boughs, unto whose form were the ever pleased faces frozen in an agony.
A mosaic of flesh. A hill rising, and upon it, their king naked and terrible in his nakedness, repugnant in his obscene flesh. Below that one figure, they all lay with their grey flesh sleeping like a sea of humans out of order, and saw the breasts of these figures white as milk stand out from the sea of grey and sapped skin. He had made his throne from the flesh he touched, from the life he tapped into, from the beauty he had stripped of mystery and merit. He sat upon them, knowing every math and geometry of their naked form. A blank mind fixed before a solved puzzle.
Walking closer, he brought the flame to the figure’s face, a thing in haphazard condition, like a drowned corpse, skin jaundiced and with bones weak as an infant’s. The cadaver lifted its face, and he, robed in white yet bleeding, stepped away, for the thing possessed his own face again. Yet, it was all wrong, older than the last one he had slain, but resembling something of himself in its deathly state. Two white eyes hollow to feeling stared up at him like a frail dog, eyes that wished for pity. A desire for a falling, radiant pity that would crush it for good.
The thing sat with its jaw hanging open, saliva treading down and oozing from its bloodless lips, long strands of hair unkempt, the flesh below the neck all devoid of hair, bare as man's prototype. A man in time yet out of it.
What are you?
The thing shook its head, and there lay a new weapon beside the thing, and it turned to it also as it saw his fire cast judgement upon his state, kneeling as if awaiting its execution. A mercy killing this would be. There was a great broad blade, already wet at the tip, and shining translucent. He picked it up, and found its touch familiar, easy to wield.
Sweet road misled me
Milk and honey melt the blade
Take us all tonight
Slurred words left the thing’s mouth, whose neck shook under the weight of its sickly head. He gave the torch for the figure to hold in its left hand, and it pushed its chest out, in desire to taste and kiss death. In the white and sickly eyes, there came the form of his death less grandiose than the death of the ant beneath the heel. Yet it was glorious. It came to dawn on the white, milky shores of his mind as a red sun, throbbing and pusling like a demonic phallus penetrating the unbearable skies of his being.
Come now come now come
'Cause mercy can't cure this now
My fruit mine to taste
Raising the sword, he swung hard, across the belly. The thing made no sound as its flesh opened, and its empty torso opened up, devoid of feeling. A body built to live for sensation. Blood ran down in fountains of gore along the soft edges of his flesh, and he took the sword again when he saw something move within. Stepping away, he beheld two frontal hooves of fire exit the caverns of the thing's body, and a goat came out from within. The strongest of its days, a male of admirable strength and majesty in its courtly movement. Its fur was that of solar sparking flame, and its eyes were wrought in tempestual fury, hammered into ocular shape by the climaxing breaths of stars, agonized in scorn and hate for every inch of life, from the cradle to the grave. And upon its murderous head, the two hideous members, the two black horns pulsated with the fire, curled and erect into moon-scything angles. The goat sprung out from the belly, and he watched the figure from which it burst out in a ball of thunder fire slop to the mound of flesh, deflated and snuffed. The torch in its hand lolled to the floor, still burning, twice as bright as the flesh of the goat. Standing aside, the animal paid him no mind, and it galloped, strong and vigorous, potent in each stride, down the mound of the sleeping orgy. Through the hairless pile, it disappeared as it furrowed downwards, cutting and thrusting through the naked bodies, until its flame was no more, and the goat was gone.
I'd ask your name
But I built my dreams upon
Orchards of your blade
All in white, he watched as the thing with its bare belly split open, without blood or sound, simply gone. He took once more the fire from the floor which could rouse no body beneath it to blaze or life. Before leaving, he regarded the face upon the cadaver. Turning, he left the thing in the dark, slain upon the slimy limbs and skin and joints of the sleeping ones, who in their naked coma, would never awake from the grip of the dark sleep they dozed off to. This tree of mouths also, was quiet, and the long, long day's orgiastic journey into the silent night had come to a finish. The party was over, and he was the final visitor.
Yet, as he made his way to the door, the metallic swooshing sound of some weapon tore through the dark behind him. His legs gave way. Hot screams poured out from his mouth like a swarm of locusts. Blood seeped out of his cut calves, running red down his own flesh. On his knees, he reached for the wounds, but felt another cut tear across his flat chest. A bright silver light flashed across him diagonally, and his robe split open at the mark. He cried out again, and with quaking fingers, reached for the slash mark across his chest. Once more, he was marked.
It took him a while to leave the room, the deep wound across his body were the testaments that he left with, the markings of his glorious journey. Sweat poured down him, pouring into his deep wounds, the pain birthing newer fire within him. Wandering, he could feel the microbial world beneath him and their dance between the twinkling fingers of life and the oily touch of extinction. The night was warm. There was no air to breathe.
Pain was his child, and deep inside the recesses of his consciousness, he loved the divine metal that slashed him so.
Warm blood fell down to the broken soil. He stood with his garments tattered and wronged, and his face was shrill, a ghost at the scarlet doorway of dawn. A body with its head lolled to the side, neck snapped head cracked lay behind him crudely. The fingertips of his hands were dug deep and entrenched into the body's jugular veins. Yea, he was not the body's keeper. He knew not its name, not its origin. He had slain the man under his own roof. He became as heavy as unpurified lead, and he sunk to the floor. Kneecaps buried into the earth, his sinful bones became dark ores with no value to this rock.
The blood on his palms dark as they plummeted to the well of eternal sorrows.
An old, rusty dawn rose and his face was a plump, bloody red as he was seized for his wrongdoing.
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