Arrival in the dawn of obscurities, the leering, long-fingered gleam and the rotored chafing, pall of duty and the law of repetition in the dun-light of known things. And lairy is the pearlescence at the margin of the seen while high-minded are the high-risen, as righteous as cold blood in the court of hell’s heat.

Prism and peristalsis! Abysm salts through bitumen froths, the orators orating fetidly. Strutting are the blues of that right-thinking sky, and the earth wrong of foot where the bitter orange grows. Alone on our bellies we pray for mercy from the saffron plate of the gods of tooth.

Now night: augur. Where is the watcher from his loneful plane? Who in seeing is sighted and who has perished that the towers mourn him in their lantern shrouds? Say so and speak no silences or cast your lot in the jaws of the fish and roam this brackish doom.

And laughingly the turn-return, the turn and turn of the lighted wheel—

Come, my Styxes: the bell is beaten and dusk illumines, and closed is the fist upon its truth. Bronze taste to hail the boatman: bear our oaths as you bore us once long and away from these styptic shoals.

Hail to the company of the dead! Arrayed in clay sarcophagus for flesh at the feast of the year. And laughing are the saved who tread damnation, and immaculate their bones soaked through.

Comes the carrion hour and the said silence. Now the women gone to their rope-pulling, the women mad at their carillons, calling matins from beyond the pale of straw:

The knee falls and soon the temple, the faithful cousin with the fatuous. The seed of the pomegranate is in our teeth.

And sallies the city in mourning greave to draw all souls from the shade of the dream:

Indeed my loved ones shall you die, 

my loving ones shall die indeed—

…

Lion Summerbell isn’t a pen name but a writer from Manhattan sort of living in Europe. @LionSummerbell on Twitter (or X, if that’s your thing).