I am the eater - a merchant's son starved and beaten
Staving pangs and knives with milk of seed from bleeding
Plato's disciple - befriender of the weak
A mere vessel of woes - a life of mind to reap
Trade a hardship for another, both desperate and regal
Sway through narcotic clouds and cleave the feeble
For misery loves company - a sadness that won't escape
No such thing as to forget - the veiled inscription remains

Oh Ambrosia! My hero, my swindle
Buy me transcedence and joy to kindle
Grant pleasure and beauty, wandering nights in youth
Drown me again - I'm dying to be pure

Paint me in abstract now my audience
Descendent of shit-faced euphoria
The pleasures I've ploughed from the soils of pain
I read aloud only to entertain
The dregs and rinsings of my intellect
Draw from the same water of those clouds of torment
She rests on my brain like vapour on mountains
Weighed down my nightmares - wit outrun power
Lays down my life - an infant I am
Unable to rise with wonder long dead

Come, join my phantoms of art
Where what acts on the whole reacts to the parts
Call upon darkness to dreams of the eye
Descend into chasms I shape every night
Live in a century - time and space swells
A chorus adieu in the caves of my hell

Imagine seated in an oscillating swing
Lunatic hands pushing malicious dreams
The low point my childhood may rise to ascend
Only to fall to the nursery again

Sweet sister of pity and celestial love
Reach hands from your grave to mine above

The loss of thee had never from heart
Not flesh, not bone, nor grief depart

Your coffin preserves, at home with worms
Death springs relics as seasons turn
Alas I wallow the high blue depths
Sorrow wrought eyes search through white beds
Where past and present melt into another
Our misery as children the laughter for others
And such is dead children whom languish in fear
As we as grown children live languishing tears

The mind's a parchment for which we scribe
Countless griefs and depths divine
Scrolls that serve for generations
Membranes cleansed in repeat successions
Solitude dismembered
Words richer than company
Birth it has been, life it is, death it shall be
None to love, none to counsel, none to pity

Their tragedies though may peer erased
Hold to traces that never displaced
Call back footsteps, peel back layers
Extort torments - secrets of ages

Like ashes below ashes of a phoenix
Eternal relays - a funereal helix
For immortal impresses scorch not away
And all wheel back to the earliest stage
Where love and romance perished together
Our hands and lips unlinked forever

I see in dreams The Dames of Affliction
The powers of suffering through great addiction
Like spokes on a mill they grind and revolve
Tearing children from mothers slain to the sword
The dames are three: Tears, Sighs and Darkness
Whose kingdoms dwell and griefs incarnate
In the heart of man where silence reigns
Speak not in words but signs to the brain
They wheel in mazes - I trace their steps
Conspire through mirrors I read from depths

The Tears break hands that guide us blind beggars
The Sighs taunt hopeless in dungeons of terror
And Darkness, her kingdom, a narrow confine
Funnels the temptress of suicide

And through my dreams the Tears cry
Seasons me for her sister of Sighs
Who weathers my carcass to sister of Darkness
Banishing my spirit of catharsis

Come climb the summit this misty dawn
See the spectre when light first spawns
A living titan amongst ghosts of Earth
Who carves the skies and mountain's hearth
Where crimson fire and guilt colludes
Plumbed to the depths of solitude
I gesture in faith - it gestures as well
I bow as its servant - it mimics my shell

And by this altar the veil dispels
The delusion itself a reflex of myself
A wretched partner who razors respite
Anchors at centre of dreams in my mind

And though he may drift between storms and tides
Like spectres amidst showers he draws back in time
The Dark Intruder - my mirrored reflection
To daylight what else be hidden forever

Herein lies a city of ruins
Sunken piers and buried humans

A liquid shrine in azure light
Quaked to dwell 'neath ocean's smite
Floating calm long glassy depths
Subsisting life from torments that draw breath

The Intruder and I dive down to her streets
To nurseries of children asleep
Waiting in vain for bells to summon
The echoes of heavens - a time becoming

"Sad and pathetic" the Intruder cries,
"These mortals' sense of present time
What they call present is perished or unborn
True present is finite - draw death 'wards all
And future is present to powers above
To sacrifice children and grieve without love."

Lover, dread agent of pleasure and pain
Might it be a path of beauty, rather than the shortest of solitude we should run?
For all roads end in goodbye, whether aloud, silent, or whispered before no one

Let us pause, reflect on the life of the eater
Throw open its depths to eyes of the reader
Stationed beforehand at some secret stand
Walk by her vast halls, aside shadows dealt hand
What revolt of horror our prediction of this life
That dances and dies in the opiate mines

The highest of highs in a list of lows
Of greatest happiness 'twas an abstract of woe
Now buried in dreams of a sleeping mind
As painful to be born as is to die

But like all who come into this world alone
I know I shall leave her to wander alone
Pass her knowing that none hold heart
Ecstasy corked in a bottle of art
So go on eat now who never ate before
As those who always ate now eat more