Album: Decompositions, Volume I, Chapter 1: Rites Of Initiation (2011)

Enter By The Narrow Gates

["All Hope Abandon Ye Who Enter Here." -Dante, The Inferno]

Bring forth the Light,
To raze colonies
In a single cleansing breath.
Don't sleep, my queen;
The sun rises one less time
Than it will set.
Now overhead, the stars
That guided our forebears
Have turned to dust.
And underfoot, the churning
Framework of this earth
Succumbs to rust.

Bring forth the Light.

These dreams of Thunder displace,
Dismantled spirit's burnt bare-
Sylphs in the shards resounding,
"Open to the Field!"
Depatterned, floating in Grace,
Mapping the fragments...
"For to awaken and reassemble,
Enter by the narrow gates."

All has been inscribed
In the footnotes of time,
From the rising dead
To the falling rains;
From these proving grounds
To the burial mounds
Of fallen satellites'
Skeletal remains.

From a timeworn note's
Subtle feeling-tone,
To the coiled scales
In this mistaken mode.
Felt the birch bark walls
Of the temple shake,
When those who from heaven,
To this earth came.

From Eleusia
To the Killing Fields;
From the Promised Land
To the coming plague;
From the trenches of
Every whispered war,
To the future wreckage
Of the Large Array.

For the gate is wide,
And the way is broad,
That delivered me
(Insufferable in-between)
From the fleeting dawn
To this endless night,
In the labyrinth
Of the Iron Kings.

Now my footsteps take precedence as the traffic sounds fade,
And this city's lungs have purged their last breath.
I'm held captive at the curb before the World's End Lane,
Where I pledge my self to uncertainty.
From this shattered breaking point each new step must be
Nothing short of the saddest act of sorcery.
In search of that fleeting adversity,
O, merciless emptiness, that used to possess me...

So farewell Persephone, at rest on the altar,
Who dared to merge stone with the skies.
What curses of men guard the bridges you built, dear?
What doorways, what star-gates have you left behind?
So I'm following stardust, what's left of the twilight,
To get to that last jagged line.
To the edge of the earth by the age of rebirth.
I'll dissolve, end this realm, and reclaim what is mine.

Take in the knitting air,
Part with the cleansing breath,
Destiny turns the soils in which we manifest.
Suffer the burning coals,
Yield to the spiral tides,
Peer into the darkness, that all may be defined.

(swing wide the narrow gates)