Perdurance

Mesmerized by the outline of a shadow cast by a phantom This torn wet-smelling hallucination of the body a pitiful remnant torn from weak old fingers The smoke trembling under the roof The sound of wind against the elm The thin perilous condition of negative entropy Discourse is not life Its time is not ours These are the arrows that kill sleep in the night at all hours The flood is gone, the ebb has come

Submitted by BloodShrine — Apr 25, 2025

We infer, rather than perceive The remembered present The harvesting of ruins A regress that always ends in darkness Finite provinces of meaning The moment already far away Blind keys spin Horns echo backward Time is an abyss

Submitted by Pestilence — Apr 25, 2025

I cannot tell the true riddle of my own self The great fleet of thorns The tumult of inner voices Mindlessly persisting The hours that assail all things Every second is a cage Every action is a cage Every reason is a cage Anguish is alone Its supposed companion a ghost

Submitted by johnmansley — Apr 25, 2025

Disposable morphology Caving in the cage of my body Sarcophagus full of black water The galling sense of intolerable restraint Straying through an infinite nothing Wasted youth chained to this tomb Torn away from that self who could do more Yearning to crawl in among the machinery Rain over black algae Charred crucibles

Submitted by MetalElf — Apr 25, 2025

New vermin blood in old vermin skin That true secret whispered to a fence of reeds Driven over the bones of the dead Repetition like a curse Ice moving across the earth Tangled within a feedback loop Worms in spacetime Knotted by habit What shapes do we express? We are the damned, damned by the will to live

Submitted by Pestilence — Apr 25, 2025

White stone in the white sunlight The labyrinth of remembrance The empty stony maze Killing memories with a sharpened awl Killing the moments to come Beyond good and evil Beyond freedom and dignity No standard, no security, no simple acquiescence I am in Athens and Pericles is young

Submitted by Grave666 — Apr 25, 2025