Coruscate
Uncoil and reach
Enshroud
Rend and then unmake

I witness eternally
Unknowable depths of firmament

Coruscate
Uncoil and reach
Enshroud
Rend and then unmake

I witness eternally
Enveloping waves of negation

The fathoms of our reality lie steeped in bitter, blackened bedrock
Stained with the grim poison of ignorance
Shrieking clouds scud across a collapsing sky
All that we prayed for splayed against futility's flensed carcass

Eyes pointed skyward
A broad shroud of world-death illumination
Against a backdrop of absence
Accretion discs scythe the heavens

Quanta bombard
Carried on unseen aetheric streams
Shards of energy
Weightless
Soundless
Yet carrying the stories
Of countless conflagrations
OF untold worlds
Birthed, cooled, enriched, given life
Verdant patterns of myriad civilisations
The rise and fall of empires
The ebb and flow of awareness

And when all is put to the scour
The flames awash and spheres scorched to rock
Uncountable entities extinguished forever

Sentience unraveled to bear no trace
Upon the lifeless crust of dark matter
The purest silence this most mute of crowds
Singularity reclaims its own

Still the stories travel
A tapestry of the past plays out
Solar death-throes glitter
Envoys of destruction unimagined

We see death without bearing witness
We see genocide bereft of extinction's bleak finality
Litanies of ending drift unheard
The void is little more than a cauldron of silence

Debris
Dust
Not even memories are left to the hunger of elemental rebirth

Unfurl thyself
Uncoil amongst the sterile breath
Of myriad star-births
As fauna hewn from singularity

A shimmering pellucid bloom of myopic radiation
Paints a voidscape of febrile beauty
Upon the weakening fabric of accepted reality
The bedrock of faith naught but dust

What secrets thus dwell within this sanguine shroud?
What lies hidden within burning alcoves thus aflame?
The fires rage - a silent maelstrom
The shadows thicken - where there is light, there is darkness

Illumination underscored by the umbra of the unknown

Starlight - iridescent, violent and vivid
Pour radiation unto the vortex of ignorance

A hopeless, pitiful yearning grows
TO rend the skein of ethereal emptiness
I reach towards a patina of death-born promises
Clutching at rotting gossamer threads

I call again - a wordless scream for knowledge
I call again - a desperate howl for revelation

Granted the limitless sight of the ascended
I turn away now blasted by unraveled thoughts

I call again - silent greets a throat-shredding plea
I call again - feeble cries echo in a vacuum of nothingness

We see but cannot see
We hear but cannot hear
What we face with our senses is the purest illusion
Transmissions from a realm of the unknowable

All is filtered through the withered substrate
Of perceptions worn thin like gauze
Rotting through as a death-shroud
Stained with corpse-dust

When the last of us ceases to trust
All that is perceived, all that is known
All that is experienced
Where then for a mind that cracks free of its moorings?

To the maze of memory we thus retreat
Inwards and downwards
To the fog of time long dead
And the straining patterns that fail to contain
Things once known
Things once seen and felt and feared and ignored

Once again, we turn away and deny

Echoes reverberate in a chaotic mire of
Unreasoning
Again... and again... etched in decaying blood
Reverberating in flesh and spoiled
By the crushing, glacial cascade of the hourglass

We lie to ourselves
Crushed by the benediction of our own
Weakness
As we age and fail,
Tendrils of betrayal a final prison

We lie to ourselves

The aether is a charnel-house

Frozen in time
By the exorbitant wave of rending
Thrown forth from matter's death-throes
Realities pause

And those with the temerity
To simply watch and wait
To stand in stupefaction
The exhalation of negation draws inexorably closer

Mesmerised by the promise of extinguishment
Enraptured by the prospect of nothingness
Uncountable cries rise up
As one hideous, desperate fugue

Razor away this pitiful raiment of mass
Free us from the heavy sackcloth of our own knowledge
Freeze and flense
Release us from material bondage
And unleash upon us a death-age of complete emptiness

And yet the void does not hear
Does not feel, does not think
A breath colder than the furthest, rotting reaches of time itself
Engulfs all, consumes all, ends all

There can be no rebirth within this fractured fissure
That once we called 'universe'
Now clutching like a ligature
Gripping tight, oppressive, choking
Crushing the meaning from the material

I saw all colour bleached from the sky
I saw all life drained from the soils at my feet
I saw a million souls stripped from their fleshy prisons
I saw my own death staring back at me
Through the filmy orbs of my own accuser
I watched myself and this reality emptied
I saw skin become pallid, diaphanous parchment

One pitiful drop at a time, vigour drains
As great wings of finality unfurl
Throwing aeons into shadow
Unseen by a legion of bloodless eyes
Riven by a gradual weakening
Perceiving naught

Painless was the bleeding
And so we felt nothing at our parting
Life-essence reaved
Translucent skin bleached
Emptying veins throb and stutter
We fade to little more than ghosts

Cold fingers press against the surface of a sterilised credo
Eyes glazed, a legion of ciphers bend low
Thralls enthralled, supine before the Eucharist
A stained mirror reflecting naught but stagnation

So willingly did we surrender
Into this numb grasp of unmaking
Our footing lost on foundations of vapour

So willingly did we supplicate
To a deity etched in the translucent tatters
Of ignorance's raiment in hopelessness befouled

So willingly did we disappear
So willingly did we disappear

A choir of unreality chimes
A host of obsidian seraphim swarms
Etched upon the tapestry of reason
A litany of falsehoods awash with fear

Fear of all-encompassing emptiness
Fear of an infinity of the unknown
Fear of the purity of meaninglessness
Fear of a darkness that acts as a mirror to ignorance

Carved in the very coldest regions of an uncaring bleak multiverse
Hewn from strident monoliths of absence and vacuum

And so
I condemn a species that thrives on its own terror
That derives essence from the spire of pity
And I seek my place amongst the temples

There are many places in which true wisdom hides
Where the unbroken fabric of reality lies in wait
Shrouded
Cloaked in aether's dark blessing
Beyond the sight by those tethered
To the dead weight of matter, to the prison of the flesh

Penance is sought in that which is perceptible
But no solace dwells within the rotten fabric of a half-truth

Their systems crumble beneath a hailstorm
Of unpicked knots of knowledge

Palpitating sentience trembles
Against the rearing menhirs of absolution
Secrets buried in darkness
Truth rendered in onyx