This poem was written for a writing competition with the theme “Coming full circle”.
Coming fully around its circumference once more, I noted down measurements and verified their consistency. Sulfuric ley lines radiating from the center of the stone floor, culminating in the Five-Pointed Star and encircled in turpentine, which I presently set alight by match. It seemed I was fully prepared in all matters alchemical, though, indeed, my spiritual will was lacking. Hence the reason for this cabalistic endeavor: to escape the ashen fate of a husk among husks, a vapid drone, destined to repeat my single day again and again, until joining my race of ancestors as dust (hardly a change, even). As remedy I intended to infuse with myself a soul of great stock, through practices esoteric and state-forbidden— Yes! I speak to thee of divination, art of those heretical searchers of Indonesia and further eastern places. My preparations assured, I retrieved my purple-bound tome and prepared to speak the incantations. So the ritual began. I launched into drumbeat chanting, spewing foreign phrases whose meaning I could not guess. The dusky basement became gaseous in form, a blustering dark cloud, ever rising. My chanting grew in volume and speed. The words pulsed from my mouth at a pace of their own— I could hardly catch a breath between the guttural tortured groans regurgitating from mine own lips possessed. Arrested in a fit of gurgling frenzy, swollen-tongued, I lost all control, spasming in the light like some hideous, boneless bottom-feeding fish. And there I let it take me, at the summit of my folly. In my hubris I had fashioned my spirit into a daemon, fanged, and with inset eyes of pure luxurious white. An endless sprawling creature, a true brute boring its way carelessly through chronal silk. Hours, days, millenia… All is revealed to my quivering eyes, feverish visions of ill-fates begotten by men of well-accounted will and mettle. What terrible tales were whispered to me— lilted forth in sirens’ melodies as I drifted betwixt blackstone atolls on a sea of flame enraged. Bid your sympathy, dear reader, to this unwitting traveler! I beseech thee, do not take this telling as proof of my escaping unmarred. Hark ye, there are graver horrors than being resigned to moondust. That stream of visions, of cities birthed and swallowed up, of lost souls in crystal labyrinths, of horsemen in plated mail bearing down on the condemned kin of ancient hatreds, I saw the scrolls of sacred laws cast off as chaff for crows, I saw as naked lust and bathes of gore drew a solitary tear from the Eye of Horus, and refracted in that merciful dew I bore witness to cosmic horrors with no likeness in proper English nor any pagan language, horrors whose very existence was brought on solely by the presence of my captive observation. In that instant of the endless swirling eddy of the hourglass, I could only watch. And just as suddenly I am returned, with naught but these very words as bounty for my efforts. I emerged in torpid haze to find a world that stopped and waited, untouched, for my arrival. Yet does a worthy soul now warden this corporeal form? Nay, tis an empty vessel, blasted clean as by ten-thousand years of wind and sand.