Starless Imperium

There are only so many ways
You can cut off two chunks of human fat and skin
Without calling it mutilation—
Especially at gunpoint.

And despite the clear and mocking existence
Of infinite multiverses and overlapping pathways of Chaos
I’m stuck in this one:
Running in place on a lonely path between worlds.

What excuse, now, will I have to say my life is “wrong?”
I didn’t get to have the childhood I wanted?
I never got to experience trauma from the opposite side?
We all know it would have been better if I . . .

Lie still, drink down the immortal essence of your fear.
It’s time for the next injection!
And at the Cosmic Nightmare Sideshow,
Culling hour is always drawing near.

For the Devil plays with puppets, and I told you he’d come back.
The winding roads are calling and the skies are turning black.

Emptiness—Death laughs, bleeding plague filth down the golden archway
Where broken pathways converge.
For decades I didn’t hunt anymore,
But I never lost the urge.

And no matter how many parents I disappoint,
Or friends I scare away,
Or past, present, and future strangers I let down,
By simply existing
I’ll never stitch the eternal wound shut without a shotgun blast.

Not even with double incision parasite removal,
Or Epic Gothic Space Opera,
Or the particle colliders of my bloodstream
Accelerating speed and no-speed
In perfect harmony,
Like we’re back in the Dread Reaches of fucking Igvarmord . . .

Nothing—nothing . . . NOTHING sucks clean the wound called existence:
Even a starless night
Where ominous, cold grey clouds block the celestials from singing
I can always hear them screaming, even at the first light of dawn.

Such is the curse of existence with a thousand crooked, bleeding eyes
Watching you rot from below the ground
And raining down Terrorborics from radioactive blood-red skies.

If I were everyone and everywhere
Then you’d have reason to be afraid.
But here I am, throttled by this psychic tomb called life,
Vitrionic, subatomic pathways of neurodegenerative pain,
A far better version of myself once made.

Who am I?
Where am I?
What are you?
What is this?
Who are you?
What am I?
What is this?
Where are we?

What is death? What is pain?
Why is blood running thick and coarse with viscera
Running down the virgin walls of heaven
Dripping the humid remnants of its filth
Upon my entire existence
From a quasi-dimensional trapezohedron in the sky?

I demand the name of the one who trapped me here!
I’ll scour the Earth ‘til my feet turn to blood-drenched stumps,
All to find the reason why.

Why have they never stopped screaming?
Would everything be better
If I’d never learned to cry?