1. |
A Drowning in Sunlight
08:29
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Scarcely I slept, restless and fitful / Tossed ashore by oneiric tides / Waking, walking, sand in my hair / Blood shivering in the dark
I have held my heart in my hands / Tested its sustenance, useless and cold / Crouching among the circle of stones / Flickering stars merely
pinpricks of regret
Dreaming — the stark and sunlit threshold/Over and over — slipping closer to the door
I transmute delirium to substance / Dripping with sweat, cursed and feeble / I cannot recall the form of a tiger / The fragrance of wood,
the slickness of deceit
I reject, I deny, I lament that which I create / Curling inward, cowering from light/Lurching from idyll again into ruination
I drag my raft by night to the current’s edge/Shoreline strewn with glass, like fistfuls of teeth / Cast upon wine-dark seas of time/Over the scuttling things that wreathe the innards of the earth
Behold the sum of man, behold the price of rest / One forbidden sight, one familiar sin / To soar into the sun, to crush that which you hold
most dear
I have felt its breath in my sleeping mouth / A bitter taste I cannot coax or reproduce / Now, dragged into the moaning daylight / I feel it slip forever from my trembling hands
For each attempt to produce a form in perfect structure / The more distended and grotesque my progeny / I resign myself to slump at last into the pyre / But with relief, with humility, with terror I am unharmed
Steady my hand, light of the morning / Denuder of self, destroyer of all, deposer of kings, diminisher of man.
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2. |
An Apiarist
09:51
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Ordered, golden orchard of budding umbilical pathways / Groomed and manicured with subservient hands / We few custodians strain in restless industry / Cloistered within stark and feverish walls
Mask, tool, and smoker shouldered in labor / A daily pilgrimage of excremental mud / Toward the shrine of squat and droning hives / Clockwork wings in swelling chorus
I had begun to loathe the trees in their luster / Blooming perpetual, incense and sulphur / Fruit dripping from gnarled, alveolar branches like the limbs of a sunken and tubercular harvest queen
Once I rose in stealth to walk by fading starlight along the edge of a sleeping canal / Peering through the cataract of sweating, claustrophobic pre-dawn darkness smothering its banks
I knelt at the water’s edge / Fixated on the silhouette / Reflected in the onyx surface / As it shuddered slowly into form
Faint glow caught like a handful of bees, stinging, dead in my palm / Great soiled aurora advancing, slick like oil smeared across anemic skies
Its luminous tendrils slithered across the rooftops/ To light this boundary, a curtain of glass / The face that rippled, recoiling below me / The stricken visage of a familiar and monstrous parasite
I bent, weeping, to drink from the canal / The blood which I knew was of my host / Beyond the vein unfurled an open landscape whose
exquisite austerity would not abide my existence.
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3. |
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Stirring beyond an endless gulf of apprehension / Bent into the lurid autopsy of a mirror / Pupils dilate, malign and unfamiliar / As an arrangement of flies on a vacant windowsill
Lips dripping with bile and saliva / Hands that burrow, burrow through organ and tumor
Our bodies like a crust of roaches / Clot the earth’s folds, rustling and filthy in this slowly-filling well of depravation / For the love of god, will you not lower me the rope?
Am I throat or the hands at the garrote? / A cyclic sacrament /
Rejoice in the blessings of misery and death
Are we not lain under the hill of Prometheus? / Fallen upon the
dagger, “thy handle turn toward my hand?”
The scar that precedes the falling of the blow / The open grave which prefigures every birth / I am the hand that wounds, I am the arch tower of guts and the arrow buried forever in its breast.
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4. |
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An insect lands, black and ugly / On the cool expanse of her forehead / Ashen legs dangle, shoeless / From the rippled shade of a culvert / The sagging trestle groans overhead / And melts away into the slinking fog
A whirling tumult of rats squirming and tangled / Enraptured, all fucking and whelping / Squealing pink and twisting crown of worms, beckoned by a cool and nerveless hand / Curled in a curious gesture
Crippled Athena, spring from your headless grave / Burst from the loins of a careless word / Foul golem, echo of an echo / A gut-fear seeping into daylight
Flawed in every facet / False in every aspect
A peeling skull / A hall of mirrors / A twisting scaffold / Its drapery degloved
Fraying and endless wound / Meager and threadbare quilt of daybreak pulled over the all-abiding nightmare / A place where time revolves and eddies in a filthy slough, to lap forever against her milky scalp
Compelled, as if drawn upon a silent string / The insect stirs again, and crawls toward her eye — wide now, uncomprehending — and it begins to lay its eggs.
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5. |
A Crown of Asphodel
06:27
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An isthmus, a glacier, a vast and sullen desert / A mossy haven seared to stricken tinder / A homeward vision perpetually distant / A precious body crumbled to dust in our hands
Desperate stewards of a fast-eroding levee / Hobbled crabs tracing circles in the sand / We reach, lunging useless at her shadow / In confusion as she recedes like the tide
The lurch of vertigo on the precipice of cold nostalgia /
Crumbling facade of the present clutching at our wrists with hands
made of ice
In every star a hungry and wandering ghost, in every heart a churning mass of worms
For such a fragile lie we thirst, we convulse / On our knees as
penitents in a lake of dust
And she wears her crown of asphodel, slick with dew, though they grow at the mouth of hell.
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Drouth Portland, Oregon
M. Stikker - Guitar, Vocals, Lyrics
P. Fiorentino - Drums
J. Edwards - Guitar, Vocals
M. Solis - Bass
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