At night without a lamp, the trees are ghosts;
They loom, they lurk, they fractally recurse.
In depths of shadows howls move, the wolves
Of fear, the snakes of scare, the crows of death.
Come six, the day abed. Come eight, the dark.
And with it, gods: Unknown, Unshaped, Unseen.
What glory dawn has been and is no more!
The restoration of the world we lost.
A scant few decades past this was the world:
A dance of flame to keep the night apart.
And now, our lamps cast pools, candesce, penumb.
The dark is where we hide, where once it hid.
Horizons fade. Our blindness lost, we lose
The splash of Milky Way across the sky.
By: Isilmea
When summoning demons, a grammar’s required,
A grimoire, a ponderous tome of desires.
Arsenic, candlelight, horsehair and fires,
Upside-down symbols and unholy choirs.
The cerements, synapses, salts and surprises,
The deal signed in blood with fine printed clauses,
The pyxes, ciboria, the desecrate losses,
Impertinent heresies, thumbing of noses.
The grammar, the numbers, the deep structured cadence
All echoes grimmer and deeper acquaintance:
That grammar and glamour were once the same radix,
A fear of high language confusing plebeians.
For weavers of spellwords were once naught but poets,
Summoning demons though they might not know it:
When conjuring shades or religions, their souls writ
Political speeches and potboiler spirits.
By these lights, each writerly pen is a chalice
Filled with the ink of heretical magic.
Our mistrust of language runs deep through our practice,
For Words were the mystery, chanting and tragic.
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