Pulling on the mud caked creased and drawn leather boots Feet cold, atonic and rheumatic, bunions bulging, inflamed Shabby woolen blanket tossed aside in a crumpled mass The sun has not yet risen, the day begins without a shadow No beaks of birds commanding chirrups of lilting or alarm A stifling stillness as the waking world trembles, warming Puffs of pungent briny breath passing between nidorous cuspids Dissipating gloom drifting into a moodless morning chill Dragging footsteps scraping seas of dew drenched blades Where beneath the sagging sapling, a sack sits silent As the shoveling sounds of splitting earth fall in loose rhythms Elbows creak, hips pop and swivel, knees crackling raw and crass Thudding soil falls and tumbles, amassing morbid mounds Worms wriggle and writhe, tight air stinging slimy skins Earthen apertures and widening orifices inaugurate the carcass Linger to be lowered while the grim and grievous bow And wistfully weep into stained white silken handkerchiefs But to the striking sharpened spade they mean nothing A parcel entombed in a pine box knotted and gnarled Inhumed into the cavernous maw, dressed and darkened Draped atop the kindled pyre and set aflame by arrow Disappearing into darkly sparkling cold and choppy seas Burned to ash and drifting into star spotted skies Lifted high and flung across cottage dotted country sides Body tossed shamelessly over top of collapsing city walls Picked apart by carrion creatures tugging sinewy straps Beyond gates guarded by dripping jaws of jewel eyed jackals For the gallows does well to those who would do ill Never a shortage of cadavers delivered down the hill On wobbly wheeled canvas carts of jostling limbs and torsos Over bumps and rutted roads, skulls split and tumbling Halting against the boots of the lunching laborer A pointed pause to snatch a snort of stinging sour liquor Chewing sounds and smacking lips, clumps of soft bread Packed against incisor gaps and washed over with saliva As once again the dull pointed pickaxe splits the soil Busy days of dying death make for dreary days of digging Going all, where all must go unquestioning, irresistible As age with its stealing steps claws us in its cold clutches And the great wheel creaks and moans as it turns again The fortune has been sold, the future told and set precedes you Ineludible fate, a steady ripple across a turbid temporal tarn Advancing unwilling faraway and mucky mist laden shores Unfamiliar croaks of murky mysterious and glistening amphibians Clouded retinas glowing, rustling just beyond the ring of reeds Cloistered in shadows deep and moist amidst tangled roots Reaching tendrils claw and creep through sand specked mud Slimy fungus crouching in the hollows of a whispering withered log Robed in ripened mucous membranes thick and gooey mosses Revolting miry algae clumped in steaming heaps buzzing with insects Stench of bubbling gases gurgling through grimey gummous ooze Squeezed through stinking jellied gills of putrid piscine parcels All are bound unknowing to the ever-repeating mobius Ceaseless cyclopean cycles, cascading currents cleaving canyons Wherein walks the grave digger, bearing artifacts of the Artifex Mummified masterminds shambling subterranean stone corridors Angular arcs of sunlight stabbing motes of dusty ancient air A solemn somnolent sexton dangling ugly unwashed toes Taking their repast and farting bluntly as they contemplate Whom shall be next to pick up the spade and shoulder the station Of they who embalm and entomb the stiffened lifeless husks When into the trough they tumble themselves Upon their drowning dusk
A multimedia puzzle-story of an immortal being's struggle to define and exert their will upon a wholly deterministic and ambivalent multiverse, and the strange cult who loves them.
