All will fall
All will sink
All will drown
All will fade with time

I scan the horizon
Watching, waiting
To gaze upon the grey spine of the cathedral spire
Piercing the clouds that swathe this blasted horizon
A totem of the permanence within this fog laden expanse

Eternal I am, yet each tread
On these desolate soils
And through these banks of rearing sedge
Enervate me ever further
The ghostly breath of winter enshrouds
Reaper - Harvester
Scourer of essence
The inevitable embrace whispers from an endpoint yet to be

Rotten wings spread with a torpid snap
A roiling howl that promises only a bouquet of woe
Gathering in volume, a colossal choir builds
Unearthly presence bleeds shadow over a broken landscape

Mists unfurl in a tide of unspoken promises
Supplicating embrace of ten thousand forgotten threnodies
Yet I can hear them... each and every one
Wordless these paeans to harrowed incarnation

Silence Raised to a deafening roar that shreds the senses
Eyes and ears forced shut, I revel in abnegation
And let my soul-sense wander

Slithering bent fingers of gelid ghostliness
Probe the blackened slopes of that stoic island
tomb or temple? Only the dead can know
Their unrelenting mantra unveils naught save timeless prophecy

And still... these wretched revenants whisper

All will fall
All will sink
All will drown
All will fade with time

Time

That humiliating arbitrary adjudicator
Your cruelty builds in an endless cycle of decrepitude
Skin slackens with each passing seconds
Flesh weakens and softens
Bones stiffen in agony
Dreams dissolve
Hopes slough
A blackened pulp of deepest despair
A mind enfeebled and afraid
Gazes back upon a path of waste and regret
Gazes ahead only to t he cold and the empty

All will fall
All will fail
All will fall
All will fail

And so with each heavy, broken-backed step I inch closer to my reckoning
Sinews stiff, sloughing, sagging
Resonating with slow decay like catgut strings
Draped across a stave of rotting timber

The cathedral looms... Tearing, oppressive, stentorian
Cries once echoed in the chapels of cold stone
Where cowled figures dripped with feverish piety
And candles of reverence flickered in the torpid darkness of unanswered prayers

Stoic monolith that bleeds black redemption
Onyx shroud shed like skin
Penance driven into the maw of the soil
Stygian crust that chokes on the carcasses of the forgotten

There is no room here
Suffocation... Rejection...

A hopeless soul slithers in vapid vestibules
Echoes
Silhouettes
Fading notions of what once breathed false proclamations
Granite shaped by the echoes of supplication
Myriad visages gaze in judgement
A solemn phalanx stands as one
One singular totem of accusation
Choral, somnolent striking the marrow
Of a soul laced with corrosive regret

Guilty - Pathetic - Cringing
Crushed by stone
Withering within the inquisition cloisters
The last shreds of waning hope thus scatter

I cannot see what lurks within these sepulchral shadows
Emanating whispers of a thousand past condemnations

One thousand past condemnations!

Freezing hands reach - coiling, cloying

My name is but dust

And I flee again

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

I descend
I descend again
I closed my eyes and still these vistas rend

The waning sun... it's light so thing
Sickly, these pale shafts press
At a gruesome fog, an entangling torpor
Stripping the fenland air of pellucidity
Writhing chains of spiritual desolation reach
And beckons a shattered soul back into darkness

As the soils part in welcome
A riven aperture to embrace a sundered spirit
Closing like a withered fist
Around a frond of pale tissue

Weak - so very weak
Cold - frozen to the marrow
Encased by the frost of loathing
I have nothing left to give

Even my flesh presents naught
A cross-stitched tapestry of past failings
Pallid vessel of spiritual exsanguination
Home to the dread-stare of these listless eyes

Each sordid limb a tendril of pain
A beacon of suffering, a spite of torment
Aflame with gangrenous agony
This hemisphere of decrepitude demands extinction

Extinguish me

Yearning for ending

I beg for the embrace of the fens
A final resting place - marked only by a henge of dead trees

The cathedral stands, omniscient
A memorial to all those who walked within these shadows

Unmoved by the toil of the lost
Who sink without markings into the fathomless murk

And thus

No headstone will mark our passing
No mourners shall pay tribute
No tithes to those who surrender to blackness
No offerings for those entombed in this barren land

The bells toll only within the strata of lost ages
Earth, death, time and sorrow our parting hymns
The circle has no end - our solace, no beginning
Peace is only found in these unheralded, desolate kingdoms
Withing the silence of the soils
Amongst the mass grave of the forgotten

Cemeteries forged in peat
A cenotaph of bog oak
Shivering flesh cupped in the shriveled claws of the fenland mausoleum
Welcomed by a womb of cold earth
Coiling like a foetus, I succumb to the silence
Amputating the senses
Embracing a well of oblivion

I yearn to dissolve into the infinite
Where past, present and future are bereft of meaning
Where each echo of my torrid material self
Drips slowly into a sink hole of desolation
Where each reflection of the flesh
Causes a tidal surge of misery

A patchwork of memories floats before my mind's eye
And it is with the gratitude of a lifetime I witness them fade
Dissipating and drifting as morning mists
Eradicated for all time

I pray for nothingness
My starved will craves void
And in this stark cradle of dead fen-flesh
I have found solace
I have found my reward
I have found release
I have found my blessed death

As if through a web of obsidian silk
My sight returns as from a dream
A dream empty of thoughts and sounds and visions
And I remember it being one of the most beautiful places I had ever been
I had never before that point known such peace
A winter for the spirit, I was harvested of essence
A place of endless solace placating this soul's corroded ruins
Bereft of flesh, divorced of earth, severed of being

And now I can drift once again but soaring free
I can look down upon all I once know - all I once was
And see with the cold, crystalline clarity of the dead
Through eyes unmisted, a mind unfogged, free of the oppressive weight
Of the cathedral's dead stone
Of this body's withered flesh
Of this mind's shattered synapses

I didn't think such a quiet was possible
That the relentless roil of rage and despair thrumming like lava through me
Could be extinguished
And given over to a plateau of calm stillness

I embrace this season of ending
With every fiber of my departing consciousness
Frozen and eternal
A winter for the soul carried on oblivion's ghostly breath
One last final exhortation
To the violent winds that rend and rend and rend and rend
I surrender
I descend
I dissolve
I end.