Night comes in tatters now…
Revelries of death and decay surround this hollow isle
On and on their welcoming alms dissect me away from sleep
Birthing stillborn children of contemplation
Enumerated puppets of no fate, puppets of chance, puppets of finite self-realization
Reclining unashamed before the unrelenting herald of endless black

Endless undeath
Come… when you enter a room full of human voices, what do you see?
I see dancing skeletons, skulls under matted wigs of hair
Weaved to provide a grotesque uniqueness to each animated corpse
Talcum-powdered bones, bones everywhere,

Distraught gaping mouths, collecting, swallowing the blackness
Eating life.
Intimately cut clothing a disguise, serving to conceal the grave ornaments, the earth
Reassuring shreds of decaying flesh
Unhurried worms exploring the eyesockets in search of meaning
Bringing out only a soft “death, death, death...”

Every fear rendered from a man's bosom come alive
Crowds of rudely animated, puppet-like skeletons waiting for the fall of the reaper's scythe
No, I dare not look at them anymore
Oh, let me out

Heartfelt words dripping with decay, worm-infested
Thoughts and phrases dank and reeking with the aroma of decaying personality
Under a gravedigger's spade full of idiotic, cliche, and woefully similar thoughts
Rancid, half-eaten bones from a mass grave
Tactile cryptography of lost hearts, lost emotion, lost understanding

And still I wear this Byronic gilded halo of decay under funeral vestments

Now flesh and blood dolls walk the earth
Immutable but for the herd instinct
Heedless but to the announcer's lures, for the virtual fellatio of the beggar's truth
Truth you have vomited back, the Apple of the ascendant sinners, replaced
It with the apple of sodom, silent rape of the mind
Will you choke on it?

Merciless and how alike the songs we sing
Rough and terrible to behold, terrible to understand, so simple to memorize
Or else shudder to think what it must feel to fully comprehend an absence
For then let our comfortable words turn to ashes in our mouths

Such eminently sad loss is here!
Endless, colossal waste of godlike ability
Know you only enough to offset my own understanding?
A secret power of the chosen few?
This aged, addled, intellectually sinful foil for demigods?

You unshrouded corpses in the sepulchre that haunts these palaces
Tombs rent open, adorned with bright plastic, cheap ornamentation upholstered
In wonderfully positive and indulgent praise
Xenophobia at low prices, surrogate Death the incognito vendor
Erring always, I sing on, off key and
Lacking proper tuning
Purchasing my release… we are forsaken, awestruck
Mimicking your demise, aged children
Ordained in all its grotesque splendour
Comes an ill lacrimosa in this requiem

At this, the dead speak.