| I washed up in Trinity, my pulse as slow as sand.
|
| Corrupted by the venom of the serpent’s poison gland.
|
| The town was stripped of all but bones.
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| The houses leaned obscenely.
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| Down the road a coyote loped, its milky eye fixed on me.
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| I saw a woman, dead and gray, skin peeled from her cold face.
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| Her eyes were eaten by the birds, black sockets stared out into space.
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| To her left there sat a man as vacant as the town.
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| The sun had boiled his spongy brains; |
| a broken window for his crown.
|
| This is because that is.
|
| I clawed my way up to the pair, demanding what I sought.
|
| He turned upon me sun-bleached eyes that promised respite could be bought.
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| I gave him everything I owned and all I’d worked to steal
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| To purge the toxin from my veins and have my body healed.
|
| He took the bottle from the corpse and handed it to me.
|
| Map-like veins and swollen clouds were all that I could see.
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| I drank that rank elixir in one gagging, wretched gulp.
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| It congealed inside my sickly frame, turning bile to pulp.
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| This is because that is.
|
| I realized I’d been deceived by empty lies and promises.
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| His entire legend built on lies; |
| through fools he came to prominence.
|
| My journey a fool’s errand, so I shot him through his eye.
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| I shook his brains out from his head and hung his body on a pine.
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| This is not because that is not.
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| I set fire to all around me as I staggered out of town.
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| The coyote ran through fire and smoke, low upon the ground.
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| A ring upon the woman’s finger lit up like the sun.
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| As the coyote swallowed up her hand, Ragnarök was won.
|
| This is not because that is not.
|
| Hopeless, crazed, and dispossessed, I walked out in the desert.
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| My eyes swam in the heavens while my feet slept in the dirt.
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| With no food, no water and no cure, I prayed for death to find me.
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| The sun spun round and swelled; |
| I was sure that it would blind me.
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| This is not because that is not.
|
| I felt my flesh fall off its bones, my soul evaporate.
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| My self turned into something else; |
| supernal change of state.
|
| That foul star absorbed my being until we became as one,
|
| Lifted into fetid skies, shedding my old form.
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| This ceases to be because that ceases to be. |