II (Penance) - Fen

That humiliating arbitrary adjudicator

Your cruelty builds in an endless cycle of decrepitude

Skin slackens with each passing second

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 the cold and to 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