And though his heart did not beat, it was nevertheless shattered and racked by the agonizing pain of regret.
He tried to close his eyes.
But as death would not come to relieve him of this world… Neither would sleep.
Song of the Banshees
And in the climate of dreams when you recall her, when the world of the dream expands, wavers in light, when you stand at the edge of blessedness and sun, Then we shall make you remember, shall make you live again through the long denial of body.
For you were first dark in the light's hollow, expanding like a stain, a cancer For you were the shark in the slowed water beginning to move For you were the notched head of a snake, sensing forever warmth and form
For you were inexplicable death in the crib, the long house in betrayal.
And you were more terrible than this in a loud alley of visions, for you passed through unharmed, unchanging, As the women screamed, unraveling silence, halving the door of the world, bringing forth monsters As a child opened in parabolas of fire There at the borders of two lands burning
As the world split, wanting to swallow you back willing to give up everything to lose you in darkness.
You passed through these unharmed, unchanging, but now you see them strung on our words of your own conceiving as you pass from night to awareness of night to know that hatred is the calm of philosophers, that its price is forever, that it draws you through meteors, through winter's transfixion through the blasted rose through the shark's water through the black compression of oceans through rock-through magma to yourself-to an abscess of nothing that you will recognize as nothing, that you will know is coming again and again under the same rules.
