II (Penance)

That humiliating arbitrary adjudicator
Your cruelty builds in an endless cycle of decrepitude
Skin slackens with each passing seconds
Flesh weakens and softens
Bones stiffen in agony
Dreams dissolve
Hopes slough
A blackened pulp of deepest despair
A mind enfeebled and afraid
Gazes back upon a path of waste and regret
Gazes ahead only to t he cold and the empty

All will fall
All will fail
All will fall
All will fail

And so with each heavy, broken-backed step I inch closer to my reckoning
Sinews stiff, sloughing, sagging
Resonating with slow decay like catgut strings
Draped across a stave of rotting timber

The cathedral looms, tearing, oppressive, stentorian
Cries once echoed in the chapels of cold stone
Where cowled figures dripped with feverish piety
And candles of reverence flickered in the torpid darkness of unanswered prayers

Stoic monolith that bleeds black redemption
Onyx shroud shed like skin
Penance driven into the maw of the soil
Stygian crust that chokes on the carcasses of the forgotten

There is no room here
Suffocation, rejection

A hopeless soul slithers in vapid vestibules
Echoes
Silhouettes
Fading notions of what once breathed false proclamations
Granite shaped by the echoes of supplication
Myriad visages gaze in judgement
A solemn phalanx stands as one
One singular totem of accusation
Choral, somnolent striking the marrow
Of a soul laced with corrosive regret

Guilty - Pathetic - Cringing
Crushed by stone
Withering within the inquisition cloisters
The last shreds of waning hope thus scatter

I cannot see what lurks within these sepulchral shadows
Emanating whispers of a thousand past condemnations

One thousand past condemnations!

Freezing hands reach - coiling, cloying

My name is but dust

And I flee again