I stood wet and naked in front of a mirror,
tried to force myself to smile,
realized it cannot be done.

The spiders in my chest,
so offended by my ruse,
unzipped their chamber and dragged
silk wrapped egg sacks
down my wilting shell.

Spirals in the sand
led them in circular death-strolls,
until suddenly hell
and earth collided.

And hell is not of fire;
hell is a bloom
pressed in pages of a book
written in a forgotten language.
A flower so immense
that in the presence of the size
of such infinite deadness
and grandeur of lost memories
of sun and water,
a creature of spirit could split apart,
and lose its words for god.

When such a flower came upon the earth,
where I stood, seven miles above the sphere,
incalculable depths below nothingness,
I spake thusly unto its crumbling non-self
and its ashen tail on the wind:
"Behold, relic! My hands are encasements for blood and warmth.
Be gone, thou wretched icon of despair!"

And upon the raising of my hands,
that swollen, dry, cracking unblossom
dissolved itself into powder,
into reaches beyond my sight,
and the Earth below returned
to the state upon which I had stood before.
And the spiders, now, had gone.

All that was left behind of this half-thunk apocalypse,
in my half-blink between feigned facial contortions,
were lengthy threads of black silk
running down my shivering torso
from out my useless nipples.
And I spake thusly unto the sky,
now blue with the coming dawn:
"All is well on this mound of stone.
“The instant of my encounter with the ghostly bloom—
—from ages gone has returned forgotten.
“My blood is flowing and my hands warm the oceans.
“Now, dance, you pretty two-legged horses."

03/19/2008

Author's Note: part of my first novel titled, True Blue

Posted on 03/19/2008
Copyright © 2025 Ryan Nardi