The Mad Season

I
Beyond the walls of chaos,
Far beyond the human touch,
There is a silence where no life can exist.
The enemy dwells there,
To harvest its power
And make itself strong.

II
Rise now,
Begin your day in darkness.
We are vampires:
Awake all night, asleep all day,
Avoid the sun, it burns flesh away,
Fires burn constant, except in acid rain.

Rolling hills of dead earth,
Ghost world, desert planet.

Winding ditches of extinct rivers,
Dead and decaying trees,
The dead hills roll on for miles.

Nightfall:
Our day begins.
The streets are filling up.
The buscars begin to roll by.
We exit acid stained buildings and
Step on to the broken sidewalk.
A smell of sickness greets us.

The children no longer play in the streets,
There are diseases there, strangers to meet.
Life is a dungeon where we worship and pray,
The lamp fires burn, artificial day.
Our lives aren’t empty, but void of play.

The mistakes of our ancestors envelop us.
The decay of progress surrounds us.
We live in the ruins of irresponsibility,
I can hardly breathe, this smog is killing me.
We’re trapped in our lives, no turning back,
We call these the dark years,
Seasons of Black.

III
Black streets of temptation,
False elation.
The secrets of night are revealed
To those who dare step within its maze.
Step within, number your days.
Step inside a dark world where laws
Are meaningless,
And trust is sacred.

Our numbers are massive;
Too many to count,
Like grains of sand.
The true friends you find here
You can count on one hand.

Hollow souls without a home:
Ghouls and demons,
Con men and women of deadly beauty.
So many eyes of certain distrust.

Bloody, crowded streets wet with red rain,
Laced with pain.

It always seems to grow colder and colder
When you’re always looking over your shoulder.

The city streets take you in;
She is a city, faceless beholder.
She is silent and without control.
To speak to strangers is a foolish move;
We must remain nameless,
Minds without a face,
Too easily erased.
Like hatching eggs, conformity cracks.
In these small hours existence is black.
This is the place
Where morality bends.
This is the tomb
Where all life ends.

IV
How can the newsmen tell you lies
And play with your minds in verbal disguise?
It is hard to tell if what they’re reporting is true
When their speech is filtered before it reaches you.

Send your men from the machine
To capture those whose speech is free.
At the mercy of the machine
That sees your flesh as bills of green.

In the streets of the pitch black night,
Events occur that the masses never know.
The machine knows all but obscures our sight.
Only darkness exists when they eclipse the light.

They can censor our thoughts
By censoring our speech;
Sucking us dry like a hungry leech.

Society falls in the course of a day,
All is black and we are afraid.

Many don’t fit the mold in the eyes of the Czar.
At the mercy of the machine we are.

V
Within the walls of chaos,
We work to weaken the machine,
To crush the skulls of its suited rats:
Agents of a new world order built on
Control and domination.
Its nature has been revealed to us:
True power is in numbers.

VI
Fear of the beast
In cold prison cells.
Beyond these walls,
We can hear the sounds of the greatest war
The world has ever seen.
We can hear the chaotic pounding of
One hundred million stampeding feet.
We can hear the outside world exploding around us
And we know,
Regardless of whether this new world order
Marches on or falls,
All we’ve ever known is gone forever
In the pages of the past.
Like an iron ball to the bricks,
Our world has been relentlessly smashed.

Finally,
The war march ends and
We are freed from our prisons…
And we step outside to a ruined world…

VII
The broken skyline is a shadow of the past.
The houses of God,
Shattered stone temples,
Are now the brothels of human demons
With aspirations to be the devil’s destructor,
Instead of his thrall.
Such a day would be the death of us all.

And will we live on? Will we remain?
How much more are we able to take?

This land is beyond salvation,
Far beyond a colossal jail,
Far beyond the pale.

VIII
Can you smell the poison in the air?
The silent apocalypse waiting to wake itself?
The black, progressive horror that has been
Cocooned for so long, slowly cracking,
Its surface steadily chipping away?
We don’t know what hides within,
But it is dark and hideous.
It is the end of all we know,
And it is slowly rising.
It has been feeding off the chaos
That man has created.
We gave birth to it,
We fed it and helped it to grow.
Now it is ready to emerge,
Now it is ready to bite that hand that feeds it…

IX
The new season is hot with chaos,
The days are hotter than ever before,
Our endurance is slowly decreasing during these
Hot, feverish months.
The Earth’s skin has shriveled and cracked
Under the heat of the fiery sky.
Ultimately,
The weaker ones could not survive and
Fell into oblivion,
To the darkest fathoms of the human heart;
The heart of nothingness,
Mortal hell.

Today,
The hottest day of the year,
The flesh and the devil touch for a brief moment;
The kiss of death and the wild beast
Born in the bloody dirt.
Its vampyre like tongue lapping up the fresh, red puddles
Before they can be hardened by the
Smoldering heat of the unforgiving day.

They say the sun shines brightest
right before the storm.
And the darkest part of the human heart
Collects in the heavens.
A dark overcast stretches out above us,
Blotting out the sun.
Its black eye looms in the center.
We emerge from our homes and stare in
Hopeless terror as its belly cracks open and
A calm madness seeps out.

The demon comes in the wind,
Howling at us with ardent ferocity and such force that
The ground trembles and tears apart,
Opening great canyons beneath our feet,
Swallowing entire cities.

The Demons are in Heaven,
The Gods are in Hell.
O, Beasts and Devils,
Creatures of the dark,
Keep away!
We must run while we still have land
To press our feet into.
We do not wish escape
To the fathoms below.

X
Death has no meaning in the embers
Of the pale fire.
The dwindling fires reveal nothing
Of what existed just days ago.

Many small moments I lie still,
Believing myself to be dead.
But in uncertain movements
I open my eyes and sit up.
Unexpectedly, a mutated wing
Brushes my ear and I turn to see
A vulture perched on the broken wall
I’m leaning against,
Screaming harshly in its primitive speech.
I slap it away-
Be gone, scavenger,
Fly back to the pits.

I begin to notice the others,
Knowing they are confused like myself.
Their heads swirl about
And they wonder if this is Earth or Hell,
The end or just the beginning.
I slowly brush away the dirt in my eyes
And allow my vision to clear.
My movements are slow and tedious,
And the others seem to be a dozen and a dozen more mirrors
Of my own movement, my own confusion.
We have become a giant blemish upon the center
Of the dying heart,
The failed God.
* * *
We are slow, like mutants.
And weak, like insects to men.
We sit upon our broken thrones
Of fallen kith and kin,
Within the shattered temples of our dead Gods.
We are too lost to mourn.
We still live and it means nothing.
It is worse that we have been spared death
And we envy the dead.

"Join us again,
Rise from the dead like Lazarus.
Stir the winds and
Rise from dust."
"No, grant us peaceful slumber,
The grave is still the best shelter
Against the storms of destiny."
XI
I like to tell rhapsodic, old tales
Of the prime season, the peaceful men,
The last of what we understand.

Squatting in the dust, I spin my new yarn,
Dust and dirt blowing in my eyes.
With every word, minor fractions of
Strangers and friends enter my mouth
And come to rest upon my tongue.
Later, we fall to sleep,
Retiring to our endless dreams,
Opening an occasional eye
And shutting it just as quickly
So as to return to sleep;
To wash away the blood in the garden
(the blood in our minds).
Where there is Hell,
There is no time.

We wake up constantly from dreams of
Peaceful slumber in a ray of sunshine,
Only to open our eyes to a black dawn.
To a world where there are no believers,
Where there is no god,
Where there are no rules or laws.
Only the paramount psychopaths:
The mutated ones, slow but massive.
Huge, deformed beast-men who believe
They were made to rule.
But such a concept has no meaning.
Such things don’t matter any longer,
It seems that nothing does…

XII
And the mad season rolls on,
Year upon year,
Madness upon madness.
Our creation.
Our Hell.
Our road to nowhere but the end.
Man has destroyed God and taken his place.
New religions have been created,
New myths have been invented,
New laws have replaced the old.
But many of us just can’t follow
These surrogate Gods.
How did we fall under their rule
And become slaves to monsters?

We can no longer obey.

The time has come for it to end,
The time has come for the beasts to fall.
We must fight to reclaim our lives,
Or else we won’t have lives at all.

The great battle begins tonight,
We fight and bleed and kill and die.
At last we gain our freedom back,
And raise our weapons to the sky.

We drop our weapons to the ground,
On twisted corpses and bloodied flesh.
We celebrate for the very last time,
And forget for a while that we are next.

XIII
We are the last of wisdom left.
We are all that is light,
Lost in darkness.
Fallen descendants of a land
That has been forgotten in the fire that burned so high
That the sky was obscured.
We mourned the blue of the sky,
The blue spark in a child’s eye
Obscured by tears.

We are the last,
No offspring to sing our traditional songs:
Songs of joy when the world was
Young and free,
When we were sure our race was eternal.
What a sweet occasion.
What divine nights we had.
What sacred words we could speak
Freely and openly for all to hear.
But now the flame
Is a spark in the darkness,
Nothing more.

We are the last.
We are the embers of a wild fire.
Slowly we sink into the mire.
We try to hold on
To what‘s left of our lives.
Our plates are empty
And our glasses are dry.
The great feast is over,
And we die…

XIV ELEGY
…These shattered temples,
Standing amidst this desert land.
Archaic symbols of our deity,
When our time was at hand.

These shattered temples,
Born from a time when humanity reigned.
Now this land is dead and silent,
But these shattered temples remain…


In nomine Patris,
et Filii,
et Spiritus Sancti.
Amen.


XV DAWN

We thought that all was lost and dead,
As dead as us.
But these temples,
These broken, decrepit temples,
Housed something incredible:
Hope.

The time has come for greater things,
To open a world to boundless dreams.
The time is now.
An hour before nightfall,
A day before time.
Give forth your adorations,
Your petty needs and great hopes
Which we replaced with
Greater needs,
Greater hopes.

A whole new dawn,
A Garden of Eden.
No more exile,
No fear in the palace of light.
Night never falls,
It exists past the horizon
Upon another plane,
At the palace of residual,
The palace of pain.

Let me fall far beyond
This darkness where sadness sings.
The time has come for greater things.


Taken from Clockwork by Geoffrey Foster, 2009. To learn more about this book and others, you can visit my website at http://geoffrey-foster.webs.com/