Necropolis[1]

J.S. Squires

April 03, 2006

April 04, 2006

 

Had night’s eyes finally slipped

Beneath their royal sheeting,

That a lone soul wandered the city

In search of morning’s bliss?

Where had it gone, this summer sun,

That the heat remained without

A guiding star to steer the rout?

Instead, the soul wandered on

With a physicality to his mind

That led him onward, unheeding,

The sound of some rhythmic pound

That symbolized something unknown.

There, he paused to see the world

With ears to the thumping sound,

And to see if the skies truly moved

To some celestial choirs song,

Or whether winds sang natural

Because of the rotation and the sun,

Skewed axis pivoting the seasons

In a cycle of physical disorder

Only penned in complex pinions

To seem less entropic, more ordered.

 

There, breaching, he saw the city

From an his abode in the sky,

Not ethereal or even romantic,

Simply concrete and mundane,

He felt his home a kingdom

Only when he was lost from it,

Or it from him—a prison he loved

Only because it was to him familiar!.

There, sprawling before him was

Necropolis, the city of his livelihood,

A place of both the damned sinner

And the supposed pious saint,

He found both dissolved and moot,

Since the blurred lines ate them both.

 

Like some urban ant colony, they trudged

Up and down the hills of their nest,

Wandering with not but idleness

In their sunken, skeletal chests.

He, of course, wondered on truth

Since he had dodged their mudging

As nothing but the grinding gears

Of their lives awaiting a resolution:

Such as can be found after the piecing

Point of a knife or crushing sound

Of a hollow point into empty skull.

He swore his mind loved them all

For being likened to his goodly soul,

But then he didn’t know his soul good

When all the others seem like his

Only sickened and distant gray.

“Where they sweet inside their docile

Shells, as even gray flowers bloom in hell

With every silent gushing of the liquid

Fires, rising in their silent heated towers?”

“No, but I had not heard a sweet sound

In weeks, not since the morning birds

Drowned beneath the rebar wings rising

High into some foreign azure sky where

There simple beats were banned and

Their songs crushed beneath mechanical

Weight.”

            But, did they sing where he was not

Or did they stop singing world wide?

“Somewhere, science had a epidemic

Of dying song birds on its tongue” he

Thought widely the sky was gray everywhere

But that he was not one to tell either.

Ploddingly, he meander passionless

Into his home, the city of Necropolis

 

“Wherefore, you visiting man, do you come?”

A spirit appeared to his right, small and bright,

“What do you mean? I live on the hill?”

He responded, annoyed by the spirits mind

“Impossible, for this is the place of sand

And its walls a prison of lost times,

Where the populations morns its life

As being every progressing slower!”

 

Quickly, the soul sought higher ground,

Fearing that he had found some abyssal

Slave sent to drag him into a new hell
“Who are you, creature, that you sing

These abstract and unrealistic words?”

 

The beast recognized his face,

Recognizing some new flaw in his mind

And cackled like some devouring crow,

“Ah, I do know you after all, young soul,

As the poet lost up on the hill, a simple mind,

With not but the knowledge of his own

Amateur rhymes and mundane mind!

The masses think you confused, you know,

That you think you’re a genius or god

Makes me agree with their accusation!”

 

What could the soul do but furrow

His brow and shrug his pained shoulders
“I would not disagree that I am confused,

Spirit, for I see ghosts and worlds forgot

As being today more important to the rout!”

He then took a seat on a hollow bench,

With the tags and paints of tribal spray

Arching over the former boring wood.

“Besides, I live on the hill, this my home,

Regardless of what the masses say!”

 

The spirit sat quick on the bench its dark form,

Wrapping its blighted wings under arms,

As perhaps a man might a brief case,

When his hands are filled with cellular phone.

It began a new sickly song to sing,

Something forgotten and something idle,

That dripped like clotted blood, slow

And entropic as Hell’s frozen Styx. “I

Am the Lethean Muse. We saw you lost

Amongst the dead souls of Necropolis,

Seeping the marrow of the broken bones!”

 

“Oh you abyssal muse, my lips don’t suckle

As the gray former factories of life.

I have no need for those relics, I have my own,

Wings to mend, that lift me from on low,

And beat back the musk of dying men.

Your withered wings wreak of former ghosts

That wished to live beyond their eyes,

And found only eternity’s limited demise!”

 

“Oh, how many young souls seek eternity”

It spoke to him with drained lips

Covering the hidden incisors point,

“Suckle at gray Lethean’s breast and drown,

In the gray light of life gone past!

Control yourself, you’ve sought death,

Now lick her secreted joys, forever

Caste in the sepulcher of suicidal grace!

Already your mind grows bane just beneath

The skull and above your liquid brain,

Blood boils around a cancerous death

Awaiting you to rest your idle pen

And accept your lustrating organ:

Not your infected me, you lost fool,

But the violence of your muscular hand!

Seek the blood ribbons inside your chest,

And accept nefarious halos instead of grace!”

 

But not even Comus could sting his skin,

With a mind all gray in complexion,

There was a thick nature to his persona.

“Sorry, Muse, The world has spun around

A need to personify evils, we not simply say

You represent forgetfulness and unknown,

Neither important to a lost narrator

In a city surrounded by the sleeping living

Who all wished they where in glory!

Little do their dreams see the broken place

Of their home as is wanes. I have seen

The doom of the planet in the skies,

Represented by the great red sun

Consuming all matter on earth. When,

then, do I get to live past my death?

Don’t you see, celestial angel, a song

Is only as long as the lungs that sing.

Eternity is limited to the earth and man,

For what good is God’s reign if your winged

Sister Cleo is burned on the cross, with

Hegel and Yeats, and Xenophon, clear

Back to Hesiod forever in the hells of

Abyssal black flames and damnation!

No, you forgotten disciple, no theory,

Not platonic form, not metaphysical

Personification, can breathe

Life back into the fires emblazoning me!

I see Urania tossed from her carriage,

All the flaming horses pulling the blind

Bard and heavens drown in boiling water.

Would you have me sing to Apollo

Or should I turn to Melpomene,

Perhaps her drunken lover Dionysus

Would sing my soul into existence,

When his eyes have melted in flames,

And her breasts have cooked crimson!

No, muse, I know what the balefire holds,

For Necropolis is a divine shore to see

All those the boatmen feeds to Cerberus—

How fat has he grown on honey cake,

Started when he fed Socrates thrice

To the each mouth of the frozen Satan”

The Lethean Muse opened its wings to fly,

But the narrating soul held fast

To the bloody talons long feared.

“Is Oblivion fleeing when it should reign?

Did you not come and seduce my dreams,

To bring my eyes to bare on setting suns,

Perhaps, bastard sister, you miss Kleos,

Should I sing your nemesis into life?

Maybe you would prefer to bare some

Other religions dark children with you?

Should I invoke Loki to dance

On Herod’s table? Or would you have

Set suckle at your dry bosoms, his

Twin heads not longer entangled with

A rectal view of enteritis’ coils cured

By a new oral fixation far less messy.

 

The winged glory finally had enough,

“You vulgar, feral worm! You mulled

Hate! Your husband of…” she sought,

But dropped whatever insult she had,

For he smiled at her. “Smile, wretch,

And know that no blind mass will eat

The fodder your dying mind produces!

I tried to save you from Necropolis,

And lull you into the glory ‘n the Abyss,

But you would have your soul digested,

And discarded by the horrible creatures

You loath so much. Avarice is thy name;

Poet not longer. You should hang on

A tree for a millennium and know true pain

For that was all the fire received! You

Speak of dreams as if they were coins!”

 

Confused, the mortal stood and walked

The skeletal bridge away from the harpy,

Sated by his attack on oblivion’s minion.

Would the creature again attack the living

With fears of unknown and dreams of the dying

When only the dead could know death.

 Instead, the sadden soul ate his victory

And went on about his journey in misery.

 

Angry skies roared above his body. Rain

Fell from the Nimbi, “vengeful for poor

Lethean birds that best were crushed quick.

“Would I expect less if I was shot to death,

But some unknown bastard with split tongue?

No, let the heavens roar their outrage,

For I see them as the vengeful brothers

Of some small girls hurt pride. Hurl

Lightening, Storm thunder, rage heaven

For man looks at you as a nuisance

When once he held you in reverence.

I could not pray to your angry obesity

Even if you fell down and swelled my vision,

For the world no longer sees your mystic

Cape as more than just a watery façade

Waiting to breach and ruin parading

Days of their organized pleasures about

The ruins of their money making schemes.

Let me sing briefly your lost days,

For like the Geat king, you should die in

Battle with a dark dragon, your mystery

Both your lofty form and your glory.

 

Song of the Nimbi

Slumbering Titan’s,

Anachronistic,

You bobble on path

Till trapped tears fall

O’er the spinning world

Where once Christ had sang

You down ‘n fiery reign

On his sinning minions

To cleanse his throne room.

Now, he sleeps in peace,

While your past creeps on

Till, longingly, tears

Fall and smother men

Again in your will

Heedless of any other.

 

Weeping giants, crash down on my mind,

And suffocate me in your incorporeal

Form, that I, too, might know submission

to an honest, greater genius than my

Own wretched, and often beaten, mindset!

No new world opens before my lost eyes,

Only the tall walls of Necropolis

And its slouching denizens

And their meandering digressions. Mindless

They wander without wonder into days

Until the years finally open like maw

And draw their blood into gay puddle,

With not but the sliding slopes to mark

The blood rush onto the hell of death!

Consume me in a new glory, and they’ll

See what once was your lost vestige.

That only the solemn secular marks

Of a rotating storm or angry eye screams

Down lightening and chaos with mighty

Winds…but I lost myself” there, he turned

And saw two lone orbs gathering nightlight,

High below the sky, the ethereal orbs

Gazed off into the distant city scene,

Where they focused on twin waxen wings

Of some Icarean gleam, a lone fluttering

Paradigm That might have been a moth or,

The remnants of a glorious insect,

Once magnificent, now forever lost.

The mirrored soul waved a quiet gesture

As the soul returned a quiet gesture waved.

 

Forcibly, a narrative voice struck him,

And he called up to the wings of twin seeing orbs,

“I am traveling about Necropolis

With only vagrant winds my flags fleeting guide,

Do you see some thing ghostly concrete

In which I too may perch and breathe subtle?

But only the sound of falling worlds echoed

From the higher celestial grounds, twin wings

Of the paradigm rose forever away leaving

Only the traces of some narrative voice

As the echo of there past and present play.

 

The mover made his way far from the past,

And walked into a realm of forests and

Starlight, where the moon hid its sleepy face

Beneath the waving crowns of mystic nymphs.

There, oh to stay there, he saw himself quieted

By a dreamy reflection in a puddle

That Blind Milton saw Eve in “Paradise”,

The soft word danced upon his worldly tongue.

“Where are their plainer words to call my dreams

That poetry or written words made complicate

 A sorrowful journey for you, Heaven made

Real, oh how I know it honest and true,

For no desert god knew better the plush love

Of thou hidden retreat, thy nightly winds

Royal where only the past consciousness

Could, like Xenophon, make himself loved!

No the future doctors error the past logos

To try and ruin all those pleasures made

Sweeter by an absent hands idle play,

That German hordes and tall Norwegian

Pirates knew all those great trees were tall Gods

Worth thinking of as stoic warriors,

Then the force and violence of blood on

On some barren, treeless sandy floor!

 

Guilefully, the rain began to poor downward,

And the puddle rippled, the soul’s face drowned

And the narrating soul lost his sense profound

Within the abyssal pools sensuous nature.

“No, no, not Narcissus lovely complex,

But some deeper, primordial wonton fate

Where before man nature was violently

Disposed in a natural hierarchy

With large teeth and large gullets perfect

To consume without the sense of despair.

No, for it is in even the dumb eyes of dogs

That I see the pain and suffering loss,

That I see within my dreaming demise daily.

Would that the puddle were not but water,

Or perhaps if some greater hand created

An equal soul from the cascading tempest,

I too might find hope in the nimbi tears,

And the violent puddles tormentors’ naïve

Onslaught! Like fallen stars in meteor showers,

Do I press my treaded dreams in your hands.”

He couldn’t explain the way rains pathetic

Nature reminded him of sorrow ‘n worlds,

But he knew that it fell with a spirit

That was best left within his sunken brow,

Only that it caused grief to drip salty

From those blue stones abstract even ‘t him.

 

With a rush to clean his wandering mind,

The doleful soul ran with eyes closed tight

To see what part of the city opened.

To the north, he found a new sense to feel:

A yawning structure of steel teeth opened

Over the water and a large creature raised

High a horn out of the sunken Nimbi. He

Has lost all track of time, for he had not seen

Them fall down around his pursuing self

Ambushed, they summoned again the toll

Of some doom inspiring bell, and a voice

As apocalyptic in sorrowful sound

That he thought hell and him at last found

To swallow and take to his final rest,

With the worm and dirt of his birth place!

 

“Come sound, rise you Coleridgian ship!

I will against your struggle, to rig your game,

And swallow the bone dies from your hallow

Boney hand! Come, then, you doleful symbols

And let us see which one is better at life:

You, the lost conscious mind on wander,

Or my physical form ailing in its spiral

Down into the doom it knows is eternity!

I have bested the winged whore you sent ‘fore

Now you send a skeletal ship with ghosts?

Would that they were pirates or demons that

I might with some gauge de-create ‘r silence,

With the menace of man’s modern powers

Of destruction and retaliation.

No longer do we fear damnation,

For we have invented the glass making

Fires that turn times sand inside out, all blown

Into bits that which was from bits first blown!

Like primordial sand inside modern glass,

We wish for abominations to kill outright,

Enemies as clear-cut as ghosts and goblins,

That genocide does plate over ice,

And becomes the first holy war

Sanctioned on all fronts! Come Mars,

Come Ares, Come Crom, come any

Pious warrior to my side, Let us seek

Those hounds of war, and cut loose their

Necks, that we might drink their fire

And seep the very souls from their eyes!”

 

But a sorrowful boat pulled from the fog,

Carefully guided away from shore,

By a man and his mindful crew.

The soul watched the passion and the fear,

As the boat went beneath his unseen chest,

All the steel beams bending into heaven,

Without a glancing look from the captain

Or his lumbering tugboat.

“Happy boat,

I fear I spoke to soon, for what a lil’ vessel

Provoke my immediate hatred, I do not know,

But accept my apologize for that absent

Harrow.

It was unfounded and full of rancor reserved

For another less noble of a stoic boat!

 

The narrator, tired of his own pretensions,

Wandered away from the skeletal form,

And approached where he thought he lived,

But there were no building on this street,

Only an image of a burning red rose, risen

Above the concrete street, a dying sort

Of rose reserved for the poetic and elite;

He thought he saw himself in the rose,

But it bled some sorrowful tears for another

Poet ignored by the polis which wept

On his death, only to forget the price paid:

To die with so many unanswered prayers

On both his and the narrators gray lips.

 

“Oh rose, what would you say if I asked

If you thought I, too, was made for bliss?

Would you prick me with your warm blood,

Usher me into some type of acceptance—

No, not some crowd crying for your death,

Heedless of the words on every breath.

I do not wish for adoration, but rather

Some form of confirmation, a type of

Penned verse for or against my own mind

Some one to turn the light on and run

Or even some type of spilt ink for me

Even if all they do is spit and disagree.

O’ rose, oh bleeding rose o’ the concrete,

Would you bow down and gravel

As I do, as my sunken wings drag limp

On the dirty barren floor of your kingdom?

Let me be a martyr for the uncouth,

The disenfranchised, or whoever will

Post me on their cross with warped nails

And hang their weight upon my arms.

We know, you floral monolith, I stand

Alone with only god my lost judge…”

And the image shimmered and left him,

With not but a haunting sensation of a

Smile as proof the uprooted plant existed

In anything but his detached mind!

 

Again, the rain let up and some dark eye

Rose from beneath the floating Nimbi sky—

Watchful for transgressions of dumb men

With air and wind within their hollow breast.

Some soft present forced aside this perception,

For his breast was full of air and unrest

As well as some distant feeling known by

Those theist to be called intimate love.

His sexual object wasn’t God’s limp wrist,

But the subtle skin of and even greater soul:

A women, his love, in which he burns in all

Hells worth driving his godlike jealousy

When her angelic eyes were cast t’ another!

But she whispered inside his vapid heart:

“Believe that you are more that you dream,

For the world is not all razors and reams

Of glass spun against your thinning skin!”

 

Inward, he sought to again hear her sing

Some inspiring tune, a battle canter to ride

Against anything that time threw in tide!

Where was her voice, though, his ears tore

To hear a sound that wasn’t dross next to her.

“Why bother to continue my journey

When I alone hear the cathartic bleeding?”

Beating wings sung the glory of her voice,

“You write, my love, because that’s what you do!

Best to ask why deer rush onto fueled death,

Or question the very nature of fire’s

Conflagration of the poor’s abode

When all they have are hollow bags of dust

Spread unto the musical world of greed!

Before your heart even fluttered f’r me

Quick language proved your succubus

Dragging you into your present day world!”

He answered with a clutching left arm grasp:

“But, sweet star, you found paradisio

Within these hollow bone wreaths relics!

You made me the dreamer of your dreams

And the wanton desires for other breasts

Burned away in the sanction of our flames,

For no love could burn the way yours does,

And, even if I were to fall ‘n the shores

But an Asteroidea—all feet pointless—

I would gravitate towards your lithe gleam

With my soft star the death and joy of me!”

 

Satisfied with his subtle confessions,

And motivated by passions revamping,

He looked to navigate with stars five pointes.

Dull the sky fell beneath their lofty might

Casting even the dreary moon in light.

Their it hung static in the sky, clear

Insipid with only blind, watchful eyes.

The narrator followed its sunken crawl

Down into the bowels of the city. There,

In its lowest point, he saw the abode

He would forever call his home. Two steps

Past the town, the Centre road crawled up

Past the snowed Olympian fields,

And near the home of the supposed heather

Of Armageddon’s most notorious,

The place of the deads’ final painful rest.

Here, he walked until one final guest sprung

Upon his weary step. Long the shadow crawled

Just under every exhausted breathe,

And the creature dug talons into his lungs,

Borrowing right under his left rib, pain,

Only horrible and unromantic pain,

Suffered to pull him down to his knees.

 

Looking over his broken shoulder, there

The winged creature sat with bloody nape

And wings spread like a doomed flag

 under the gunfire of rebellious siege!

O’ wandering traveler, how is your home?

For was this not the place of your birth?”

 

Some life fell from between his cracking teeth,

“no, leach, I was born on the quick

Southwestern winds made from noble,

Thought impoverished, roots and dropped

On my own from the cradle to the grave.”

 

The beast stretched its unburden wings,

“oh? How noble is poverty to the poor made

Rich by some pursuit they try not to exploit!

Shouldn’t you be painting plates of poems

With small ‘tygers’ moot meows, poet?”

 

The poet, struggling under the creatures girth,

Fell to his stomach flat, with blood for his back,

“Money is nothing to this poet, but I can’t

Speak for the other creatures by the same name

They may make their mistakes as they wish

But, the moot tiger roars inside my mind

At least one or twice every lunar month,

And I heed it’s bitter bite for fear it might

Never return to distract my laboring body.

As to painting plates, I work in dirt under

Apollo’s watchful praise through the year.”

 

 

“Ah, noble farmer are we?” it bit into his head

With a  sharpen beak as violent as night to day

 

“I am no farmer, nor am I truly a poet, for

Thought I pen words upon white pages,

I have nothing really but words to say, and

The talent inside my lucid gaze is lost

With the turning of sand over the ages.

Let the epochs fall down their chained hell,

And they’ll see for whom the pendulum

Fell! They may see it is me chained to the

Bloody, rodent infested pyres, charred

Skin spread ever thin over warn red bones.

 

“Melodramatic as ever,”

The creature consumed his poignant eyes,

“you will be digested and forgotten quickly,

As not but another imitator of past genius,

 A worthless ghost lost in its own praise!”

 

With a standing jump, the narrator gripped

The beast on the Mahanaim mount,

And struggled with the winged monster

Until, with all the glorious force ‘f a monster,

It reached down and severed the ligament in

His tightened leg. Blood shot forth in force,

And the good soul fell to his knee, but gripped

Tight the winged monsters throat.

 

“I will release you, creature, and you will

Leave, or I will again struggle with your form

Until I have chocked the immortal life from

Your celestial wings, and crushed your hollow breast,

Beneath the warn talons of my corporeal

Hands!” and the beast knew it was true,

For no strength had he felt like the empowered

Youth bent on his destructive course!

“Careful, man, for no substance cleans

The blood of a celestial from your hand!

Forever, will all gods curse you as unholy

And you will fall into some moral hole,

Where you will be forever trapped by a

God more powerful than all the artificial

Constructs of other dead men. Soon, your mind

Will wander until it has turned thy very

Hand against your chest, and pulled the life,

That only light boasting of warming heat,

From this they home known as Necropolis

 

“I do not fear my own mind, for it is skewed,

But the world that bore it into this realm.
Instead, I release you because I am the light,

That lives inside the sinking cities dark

Times, full of nothing but blood and pleasure,

And hedonistic, voyeuristic desires!

 I release you, not because of your idle threat,

But because I can release you from death.

Let them mark that down as my vice:

I care too much about the paradigms and

Shadows of my own designs to let them

Hurt those that could not hope to stop

The vile horrors inside my sleeping

Consciousness. Now, fly bird from your perch,

And never seek to haunt my memory again,

Or I will turn your form into decay, burn

Your heart and consume it as my past,

The wretched construct of darkness past,

And the fallen steps of some worthless

Mentality I tried to blend into vivid life.

Would you try and haunt me, vile time specter,

And tell me of the scars on my broken hands?

Do you see them, how they emblazon suffering

Which every other human has felt first?

My eyes haunt my vision with blighted cities,

The decay of all things social I know,

Though I wouldn’t know them any other way.

Another threat, another scar, another death,

What are these to someone vagrant like me?

These circus creatures of my simple mind

Perform and consume any dream called hope

That only the inferno inside my chest

proves real enough to burn me with passion;

like some lonely lamp on barren porch,

I am haunted by winged horrors and dooms

That others snuff with a wave ‘f avarice,

Or snort from a white-dotted mirror too

Distorted with social acceptance’s blur,

That they can’t see the black puss of darken eyes!

Heap spiritual aliments upon me, that

I too may slumber to things sublime;

Drain hope of physical rest forever

That I may forget that it even was!”

The liquid strife ran fleeting from his mouth,

What once was yellowed turned deathly crimson,

And the good soul know another prison

Known by its vibrant colors as living

When the world’s spindle caste dulling grays.

 

Aghast, the creature vomited bile down

Upon the floor with great glee escaping

From its own unsuspected torturer.

Finally, the creature fled from the rancor

Of the good soul’s reeling, bleeding head.

 

And the moon began to sink beneath Sun’s

Hateful rays, pummeling and crushing,

Nighttime shades into ugly, sopping grays,

The time when all good narrators sleep

Beneath the distant guise ’f pastoral sheep,

And sneak beneath Poseidon’s cannibal son

Until the good wafers are consumed,

And the guileful worms have fled in wool,

To live again, cowards, lest they die.