III (Fear)

The spirit songs scream across wind-burned heaths
 Flensing the rind of my very soul
 Corrosive embrace comforts
 In an inexorable miasma of dissolution
 A threnody that scours with the paralyzing raptor claws
 Of a lifetime of unrealized purpose
 And it as at this point that revelation strikes
 With the force of a thousand driven spear-points
 A face etched with the lexicon of destitution
 Stares back through pallid, jaundiced eyes
 That glitter with suppressed, shrieking desperation
 To rend
 To claw away the threads of cloying carnation
 To force this stooped sarcophagus
 Into the carcass-field beneath my feet
 Abnegation - silence - void
 The only triptych I seek
 Yet
 Extant not is thy solace
 Within this corrupted patina of deathsoil
 Still the Cathedral stands tall
 And in those febrile shadows
 Hopes of centuries shrivel and die
 I must move on
 I must haul this weary patchwork of cursive limbs
 Through a translucent mire
 Endless, oppressive wake
 Each tread summons the efforts of a thousand scouring exhalations
 Inch by inch, step by step, slowing, stooping
 Until, like a puppet with strings severed by the scythe of embitterment
 A figure collapses