Abounding in Song

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The one-eyed brute, the absolute zero, slouches his 15-foot frame across a stone run of white rock, as he’s wandered all these years, alone, navigating beneath a permanent twilight of red-black expanse, his unreal sky. The End came swiftly. Brief, definite, unlike it was described in any text, it took everyone—except, for whatever reason, the cyclops, wayward beast, one eye in the middle of his forehead just like the Devil, left to roam chthonic geography, night and day and then back into night, until one became the other, until one place became all places.

Things weren’t always as such. Once upon a time, in a past life, he’d worked as a blacksmith, honest work operating the bellows of eternity, raising the fire that powers all. That was until the men he worked for, on behalf of the Star King, tossed him into his own furnace, melting him down to a formless nothing. After that, he was reborn as a giant, a seafarer who swam the old salt of deep ocean, a reconstructed being, stitched together in rebirth, older than the rock formations themselves. Down there, he would float thoughtless, watching the luminescent bodies of comb jelly and vampire squid, the suckerfish feeding from his skin, a sensation of life. It was not to last.

With the age of mankind came the age of cataloguing, of categorizing, of naming and of putting into boxes. It wasn’t long until they pinned him to the earth and marked his body with tattooed lines, a grid from which they, the faithless generation, could only derive laws of no meaning or real value, merely diagrams of his anatomy, maps in obscure symbology, sketches of musculature from which they drew blueprints, engineered machines of cold extraction, a satus of misinformation, all the while mistaking the representation for the thing itself. In fact, once, he briefly reincarnated as one of the machines themselves, in a future life that, thankfully, was never to be.

So now, like an ant crawling over mountains, a being without end, tethered cosmically to endless rebirth, edges obscured, no one to pity him—although, honestly, he’d find that the biggest offense of them all—he presses into tomorrow, mounting a slow, steady charge against, he was sure, the wicked demiurge who’d singled him out, submerged him for stretches at a time, eons, long enough to weaken him, but not enough to kill. Maybe that was the point? Even then, so be it, his persistence would be a living monument in defiance of the asymmetry of justice. Or maybe it was all an illusion, a series of hallways ever-darkening with corners that sharpened their edges, twisted like the volvulus that spun his insides.

And yet—despite all this time and distance, he can still see her face, clear as the waters they swam, Galatea, his mocking beloved who, even now, laughed at him through the depths, across worlds, obscured but still—there. Often, though, she appeared as the mother of Cerberus, the beauty of her face matched only by the magnificence of her serpent’s tail, coiled through the heavens, spiraling into the distance.

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Syren Satus

Gelid ichor,
void of desire,
now-bloodless gods

in a death-mask
of waiting.

Syren satus,
call of harvest
in stonework chalk

they carve
in naming.

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