Canto: Black Eclipse Over Uruk
It came to me in a dream, a horrible dream.
If there is to be an Ikon ❙ cut it in basalt, not plaster. Seal it in bitumen, star-ash. Raise it from the drowned Ziggurats of Uruk, reed-wind threading the cracked bricks, older than the tetragrammaton, older than oath. Blood of Cain ❙ not shame. Iron inheritance under nail. Mark as voltage. Mark as refusal. Black Sun fixed over Euphrates ❙ no heliacal rising, no absolution. An eklipse without terminus. Lux in tenebrae? ❙ no ❙ tenebrae sovereign. Who bears the sign? You, inter mullieres, crowned with narcissus and meteoric slag. Ishtar at the seven gates ❙ lapis stripped, torque removed, measured descent, tariff of power ❙ but you descend, diadem of incisors intact, laughing at the toll-keeper. Saturn`s ring a cold coronet ❙ lead planet, father of harvest and severance. Regina Anthropophaga ❙ yet flesh is trivial. You consume epochs, triturate dynasties between molars of duration. Time is your mastic. Sigil whispered, cauterized ❙ idola fracta, magian dross toppled, their aurum running febrile into subterrene furnaces. Gold as contagion. Gold as melt. I long ❙ (non urbes, non vicos) but for meridian exposure desert zenith, pitiless noon, where falsum lumen combusts. Let the rivers run metalline ❙ steel undone to viscous script, towers yielding to incandescent grammar, machinery of the fatigued aeon liquefied to arterial glow beneath loam. Carnage ❙ the hemorrhage of a spent form, forma exhausta. Above: Shamash ❙ ocular copper, forensic flame, lateral wound in Deus ❙ primal fissure where lumen hesitated, where fiat faltered. From that incision spills not misericordia but gnosis. Your children ❙ call them butchers ❙ they slaughter illusion. They desiccate the final mirage, gnaw marrow from obsolete firmaments, scatter the calcined aureoles to wind. High in your own terrible claritas, you crave death ❙ you demand the terminus of rot disguised as vitality, post-hymnal suicide, clearing after fulmen. If mundus must flux ❙ let it flux as ore in crucible, annihilatio. transmutatio. Lead to blade. Slag to star. Black Sun breaking to ignition, eclipse transfigured to furnace. Cain`s mark stigma to stella. Ex ruinis imperiorum a harder astrum ascends. Forma. Severa. Inflexibilis. Viva. Death.