The Smile of the Unvanquished

Though year after year we might trudge and wade like an anemic and aimless spectre across the bloated sticky mass of mud and filth, there's no reason for the mind not to lie down in tranquil slumber, clinging with a warm and invigorated heart next to a moon-lit pond, and then to spirit away to new, strange horizons and fabulous wonders of ultramundane lineage, riding along the delicately swirling fragrance of an illusory bluebell...

in the silent immensity of a dreaming horizon our motherstar climbs with solemn grace towards the glum and ashen sky. still the wintry nightmare chuckles with glee and claws greedily for the last embers in our hearts, yet at the height of her insolent victory, she draws ever so nearer to the hour of her demise.

Rough weather outside the walls, the Wild Hunt charges by full tilt in a menacing errand of gloom and doom. It's the dagger, dripping of gelid venom, that cuts out the last stubborn remains of puerile innocence, which in other respects would survive the impugning affront of conqueror worm and the entropy of remembrance. The bark torn by invisible gnashing teeth, leaves swept across sepulchral meadows, giddy boughs dancing to the howling chimes of rusted derelicts; nature's labour pains masked as an overwrought tirade. The vigilant heron perches among the limber reed - the redoubtable pivot in the whirlpool of tides.

As the years crawl on, then gaining ever so much momentum, the oceans shrink to seas, seas retreat to lakes, lakes to dew; a single drop remains, so fragile and furtive, easily spent under the scorching glare of the motherstar. Yet, for the length of a melancholic sigh, that dew tear burns with incandescent fury that overshadows the luminosity from ultramundane worlds, wasted aeons ago across diseased gulfs and to dull, soulless eyes. Her indelible thrall flits the accursed reality of oblivion as she enmeshes herself into the womb of our unfolding fate to grow into a pearl whither eternity and the gods themselves must gravitate.

the sun grows distant in the grey-striated sky, a hazy stole wads the lacklustre barren crofts, immured by deepening shadows, the lichens and squamous excretions of crestfallen trees acquiesce to the mauling jowls of languor. then, in a trice, lifted from the hardening soil, manes laced from aurous phosphenes foulder across the wearisome pall, flinging vestigial stabs of conscience cold-eyed into the venal ingress of the bygones. cleaving the fabric of time and space apart, the flaming bosom of this eidolon burgeons evermore ardently through the effluvium of crawling chaos, and wounds invultuation s that stumble on her wayfaring. for, beyond the mephetic parhelia of febrile lures and gibbous mirages sprawls her feoff in stark eloignment from mundane designs, illumed by a twin of lodestars, wellspr

Wading lonely across those crepuscular straits, clambering up shores of slick burning shingles, feet scoured by flattened dunes of bones and teeth, eyes so worn and tired by the sight of a mournful glare that they carve themselves out their holes, and swim away their bloody pools into the parched soil where they watch in sad torture how the Man at last made his way to the brooding cliff at the farthest end of aeons, smiling faintly at the hostility of a brumal sky and leaps widely, and in the spectral blur of increasing momentum, arms transmute into large wings, and legs fuse together into a mighty swirl of a tail; flying high now, nevermore hostage to any quagmire, unbound travelling beyond the northern anchor in the nightly yonder,towards that wellspring where heroes, poets, and Titans are born.

Air coils and writhes like a snake across glittering sand dunes, from horizons doused in pallid strips of dancing mirages a matronly breeze nurses the spirit and skin from the morose thunderclap of dusty heat; already a selcouth filter creeps over the atmospheric light orchestra of the blue yonder, and swarms of mummified leaves squirm in a procession of lamentable souls along roadsides and hedges to bid that late Summer a shaky adieu as the unwilling harbinger yields trembling to the latter and buckled days of the sun's pilgrimage.

along the strolling dikes where early Spring's verdure fringes pensive rivers like a finical gleaming garland, breezing through hushed avenues of towering poplars which absorb the velvet flurry of air in a mosaic of leaves, light and shadow, their vibrations humming along with the reverberant jingle that escapes from the chest of the modest wren as a hymn engulfing the mildewed skeleton of a gaunt and dismal Gothic cathedral left forgotten, flutters the will o' wisp in spite of her brittle and coy character in the maternal embrace of a unparalleled temptation equal to the very same breath of life that sired a soul into the universe, and in her puny bagatelle she is the zoetic torch scorching the stolid ossification that traps the ambitious heart, and she is the lattice from where audacious dreams branch off to heaven, and mature in the face of our empyrean cohorts into a tide of promethean crusades, venose of blood and ink, which s

when the earthcrust churns, bounces and heaves, whilst a murder of crows gyrate as dead weight from the brumous heavens, spreading their poison of black omens, and the farmer dines on his wife's ashes watched by the senile eye of the hooded sun, the mute hours limp in tune with the yelping dirge of soused wraiths wheedling the aggravated billows to unleash their voltaic outrage, a figure forges ahead with nimble skill across seracs and moraines formed from man's repertoire of prosaic enterprises nullified. wary of loquacious hierophants promising opulent vales and sordid potlachs sprinkling trinkets of convenience to the comatose drove as they wriggle in flat resignation inside the labyrinth of their own dun-hued, stale abdomen, the wayward wanderer tersely censurs a dying world's lore from his ocean deep soul and takes in the beech's cool shade the little death in a loving embrace. engulfe

a tiny flower ensconced in the endless heath, her silken petals lap at dawn's delicate blush, thrilled by the fledging season's edicts, she foregoes her coyness and sheds her crown of crepuscular tears, beatic hope aerates each passing hour, enchanting the strayed butterfly towards her ambrosial bosom.

Worlds melt into eigengrau swamps, croaking their last breath in a drunken chorus. Stars crawl into the vehement orifices of diseased space, like martyrs fed to lions. As time itself grinds to a halt, creating a cataract of glacial eternity, wrapped in saturninity, The unknown man saddles his mare for one last vengeful odyssee to reclaim his integrity.

rising from the living flames of crespuscular might, his smile defeats the poisonous breath of brumal gloom. time after time, unaffected by the world's disgrace, you mount the the white horses running across a roiling and wrathful sea. fatigue forgotten, thirst quenched by sleek and untamed horizons aglow, he heeds to to their shrouded errands. while the balming breeze washes over his progress, under the dimmest haze of starry archipelagoes, he grafts his destiny into the phantom helix of immortality.

never a hireling to ambrosial casuistry, armoured against the ruthless brokers, who encapsulate an army of fools on islands of concrete, and the loftiest temptation widely sought out in lewd solicitations parrying by rapier, this heart quickened to life where earthlight and shadowfire meet, compels itself to rise above its own borders, shouldered by the timewind, to roam beyond the crespuscular gulf in a long journey home towards the Midsummer Eternity.