Destruction
by
Mark Andrew Holmes
I have descended into crimson clouds of darkness
And fulgent novae pulse like amoebae in the profound sooty darkness
Of my inner space
While pallid dishrag spirits drift in luminous conspicuous silence
To and fro, widely scattered.
My soul convulsed with a riot of jamais vu.
Weird atonal wailing music provides a keening background drone
Buzzing like a wasp of glass in my mind's ear
And I clap my hands to my ears, my skull vibrating,
And keep up a constant shrieking to drown out the noise.
With no one at the bridge, the din is palpable, radiant,
Encompassing the entire world,
A surreal and familiar, even beloved, horror that is uniquely mine
And yet belongs to all humanity,
Striking a chord that sets the soul of humanity trembling in compulsive
sympathy
Like an earthquake, down to the subatomic particles of its nethermost profound,
And the earth breaks up, heaving cataclysmically,
Blinding all to all but amphibian agony,
The whirling apart by terrific centrifugal force in an instant,
The wrenching oblivion of the world soul
The atomization and annihilation of all life, love and light—
And one image remains—
In ashy gloom on a basalt plain,
Cyclops with no feet and flippers for hands,
Their flesh the color and consistency of tripe,
Labor fumbling and blind, in dim silence without an iota of hope,
To build a black joyless Babel, stern and terrible and anencephically purposeless,
For their dead, vague, meaningless world—
Their only dim thought, to continue piling one titanic granite block upon another,
The grinding and clashing of stone resounding like a perpetual dirge, distant,
As if receding, yet not receding at all,
Through incomprehensible, mind-numbing eternity—
Ponderously, as if in a dream.
They know not why they build it —
They care not—
They never bothered to ask why—
And they never, through endless eons, will.
© 2001 by Mark Andrew Holmes.