The Beautiful Ones and The Found Souls

[This is the dream,

With no end.

This is the dream,

Where minds bend.

This is the dream.]

Tonight, the moon is a copper sword slicing

through black skeletal branches falling

on its waxing crescent edge.

The Beautiful Ones, in the inscrutable light float down,

Hover delicately, between the alien skies heavy 

with matted clouds – like viscid masses of disembodied

hair clotted with putrid blood - and the vast

ridges of raging fire below, the endless hurricane of

vermillion waves shooting thousands of miles high,

all along the spinning disk of the distant

horizon, violet and black.

Looking up at Their aerial allure,

(Clothed as They are in the pellucid radiance

of primal, relentless Love, They seem

at first like a billion dazzling points of light

dancing high above their heads, so far

And yet so near!),

are the countless floundering souls below -

Tempest tossed, whirling eternally through

the blazing flames swelling up and

collapsing in slow grandeur,

Circling around giant whirlpools of noxious vapors

forever leaping and falling forever.

Their oozing puffed faces pitted with rotting flesh,

Their skin covered in greenish yellow scales, their

sharp webbed fins slicing through the blistering waves, and

Their eyes with lids burnt off, like gleaming silver coins,

roll with their heads as they follow the brilliant orbit of

the Beautiful Ones -

So near and yet, so maddeningly afar!

All at once they hear a high, sweet note,

Filling the thick metallic air - unspeakably mellifluous!

Infinitely enchanting!

Ethereal music pours into the labyrinthine

coils of their inner ears:

"Come with Us, all you poor lost souls! Our aching hearts

melt with endless love and pity for your sakes - 

for all you who suffer limitless pain in this tortured space,

Your bodies and minds twisted beyond measure - 

To see you thus gives Us no pleasure!

Come with Us, give Us your hands,

We shall save you from these deadly lands!"

Like a choir singing in unison, Their voices rise

And fall, chanting high and rumbling low,

through oceans of fire and clouded skies.

Their faces, overflowing with sparkling tears from sapphire eyes, 

They bend down upon the creatures below.

"Lost souls?" they cackle, screeching in glee. "Who says we are lost?

We were like you once, O Beautiful Ones!

Wrapped in luminous garbs we too floated on high, 

riding the crimson firmament 

on the back of the silver Serpent with the 

obsidian eyes, until

This happy place found us! The crescent moon

Hanging up there like a curved blade, slashed through our

bonds and set us free from that crippling spell 

you call 'Love'! Here, in the realms of the visible dark,

there is no dissembling love, 

there is no murky hope! 

No! No pestilential mercy neither!

Leave us now, be on your way, for

We are the found souls, here to stay!"

[This is the dream -

here lurks dread.

This is the dream -

here life is fled.

This is the dream.

This is the dre...

This is the d...

This...]