Post by Mike on Apr 17, 2011 17:42:02 GMT
Full album downloadable at cauldhame.bandcamp.com
THE FLAGELLANT OF THE WASTES
FAILURE…
-The humiliating burden, the excoriating shame. Like a conjoined twin that never lived. A desiccated husk, heavy with parasites and grime; the tumescent fruit of anguish, yet its shrivelled, spindly limbs enfold me tight, nails drawing blood, its dead eyes vacant but for the mute accusation of-
FAILURE…
-An excruciating sun that never sets, gifting cataracts, searing skin and sight, irradiating every recess of existence, so that I crawl prostrate in my exhaustion, a penitent unwelcome at the gates, grovelling in the filth of insufficiency. A scalding night-black tar, hosting the leeches enticed by its cloying scent, bleeding me dry of all but the poison of-
FAILURE…
-The abasing mantra, the code of the prison of my body. My impotent enfeebled rage is a grain of salt, dwindling in a stagnant pool, the bitter tears of frustration and dismay. I drown in its brackish icy murk, crippled by uselessness and pain, dragged down and down and down by the leaden shackles of-
FAILURE…
-To behold aghast as the ugliness within contaminates the wells of others’ lives, spreading the disease of abjection and denial, disfiguring my flesh with the pockmarked scars of-
FAILURE…
-The reward that hope bequeaths to me and others like me, sliding off the razor’s edge to abide among the detritus of this world. To linger, defeated, accursed and purposeless in a lightless place known only to the wretched spectres of-
FAILURE…
PENITENT’S REQUIEM
The storm is closing in once more. Beyond the fractured window, the evening melts and runs like wax, imbibing the unctuous tar of night. As its viscous strands descend between the streetlights the purulent mass of tenements, mouldering into one, peer through blackened apertures with mute suspicion, mottled with the disfigurements of ruin.
The parasites they harbour lurk unseen, slick and clammy from the relentless rains. Flayed absences of face concealed, slimy fungal growths erupting from malformed bodies, disjointed fingers gnarled on shrivelled arms, scrabbling and twitching with the knowledge of your presence…
You cannot see them, but you know they’re there, intolerably waiting.
Swarming furtively through clefts in the crumbling walls, a mass of pullulating bodies, the insidious slither of skin on greasy skin a susurration on the leading edge of silence. A multiplicity of mouths where mouths should never be, agape and slavering with rapt anticipation.
There’s just you and them, and the plague that birthed them.
Something of which you cannot speak, a vast unfathomable foulness that blights your mind with rumour of its coming. Your future is an amputee, a sculpture of dismemberment anointed with the claw-marks of despair.
You as good as grabbed the knives and wrenched them home, embracing each agonising slash.
Existence heaves and writhes its ruined stumps, floundering in the mess of its arterial spray. Trembling and frenzied in an ecstasy of panic, convulsing itself to a ghastly stillness; a grotesque and spoiling carcass. Its sullied blood seeps through your eyelids like muddy cataracts. Your escape routes sealed with its mangled limbs, the severed extremities of hope and faith, entangled and bound in the precious snarls of wire you squirreled away in febrile desperation, knowing that this time would one day come.
Water courses down the spattered walls, bearing the contaminations of this world, glistening slickly through the oppressive murk. You taste its bitter vapour in your throat. In the darkness of your derelict red-brick womb you cringe and shiver in a wretched foetal heap, waiting for the flesh to close over your face, fusing together into one distended swelling. Time festers in an unwholesome stupor, suspended like a cadaver from the gibbet, disintegrating fleshlets consumed by the gnawing void.
As the corruption sluggishly warps your form, the puckered mouth collapsing like an abscess in your chest speaks haltingly of change and the age to come in a voice choked and wet with necrotising tissue, and in helpless captivation you listen to it chitter. As the storm intensifies outside, its whispers fill your ears with admonishments and scorn, and the gurgling of the rain in the swollen gutters sounds unendurably like the laughter of the damned.
EATER OF ASHES
It is the cold that wakes you, shivering under layers of yellowed newspaper, your limbs carving into the filthy mattress. You choke out a painful breath, the exhale coalescing like pollutant seeping from the wreckage of your flesh. The dampness glistens in the gloom; the bodies in the walls are on the move again.
Hunger, a writhing confluence of worms, cripples you with nauseating pain, deep and throbbing in your neglected gut, bidding you to arise for another day, to burrow through the effluent once more for the basest scraps of spoiled and rancid waste, the leavings of the slothful and unclean.
The pre-dusk comedown light oozes through the cracks in the windowpane and peels back the veil on the squalid room. The mangled remains of birds - remnants of feathers in contorted flesh - that you arrayed in decaying vigil
along the dusty, fly-strewn windowsill, warn you by the taste of their silence that you have been watched once more. And a knot of cold anxiety coils in your aching stomach, an inert serpent of gnawing doubt, eating you from the inside, slowly, slowly, as the worm devours the corpse.
Wrapping your tattered rags around you, you pore over the mouldering boards and the ugly dark smudges - sigils in blood and ash - that you smeared protectively around the doorframe against the dying of the blight. They glower with the threat they represent. You daub another pattern with dismay and scatter your scent along the step to seal against the harbingers of the real…those who would confine you to shape and form, the suppurating bindings of a dead identity that it pleasured you to shred.
With your last shard of precious mirror you carve words into the crumbling plaster, over and over and over and over, murmuring a litany of half-remembered names under your shallow fevered breath, fingering the gouges with bloodied digits from floor to ceiling, head spinning with fatigue. And before you know it, the night has collapsed round you, exhaustion binding you in suffering.
But you know the time is right.
The power of the names compels you, withholding the forms that shift within the walls, protecting you for one more night.
With a dead rat’s broken body cradled gently in one shaking hand to guide you to the feeding grounds of the vermin and diseased, you squeeze your emaciated form through the fissure in the bricks to the derelict house beyond, burnt-out and strewn with needles; abandoned by even the abandoned, shunned by even the shunned…
(Ah! Blessed temple and asylum!)
The tiny delicate skulls you mounted on twigs indifferently watch you leave and await your return with the patience of the dead.
THE POINT OF NO RETURN
Soon it will be dark. The future has foundered on withered limbs that can no longer bear the weight of the tumourous blights distorting its frail form. Soon it will be dark and I will feel the impulse like a hook in my repellent flesh, and my struggles will weaken, as I know they will.
The wait is almost over.
I peer down again through the smears on my window, choked by resignation, an unwilling voyeur; I cannot help myself. Clinging to the crumbling frame like the last shreds of desperation, my eyes red and sleep-deprived, my mouth dry and bitter with the aftertaste of plague. The hours buzz by like flies, signifying nothing, prolonging the inevitable - the dread, leaden in my mind, of giving up entirely - snuffing the guttered candle of a squandered existence.
A bruised smudge of sky contaminates the light. A limitless ocean of rubble, like petrified concrete bodies protruding from poisoned earth…a desert of broken glass and refuse…the Wastelands of Failure that gnaw the stark horizon. Smoke hangs lifeless in the distance like the harbinger of cancer that long since ate the world away and despoiled its hope-stained husk, anaesthetised by the incessant clamour of trains that never stop…
(With indifferent metallic shrieks they roar contemptuously by, like fever-dreams of searing light that lacerate the jaundiced skin of the noxious urban dusk. Like the whiplash of sardonic fate across the tortured scar tissue of this place which is no place…)
Soon it will be dark, and when the streetlights leak sulphur like malignant thuribles, THEY will one by one emerge from whatever sordid trench they call their own, malnourished, graceless and grotesque, oblivious to others of their kind. Some flounder, crawl and scrabble, incapable of any more. Scavenging leftover scraps of life, sifting through the wreckage for the most wretched fragments, shedding tatters of psyche. Mud-larks of the pollution age; shrivelled, emaciated things in a uniform of rags and grime pore over bloodstained tarmac (mute and uncomprehending, when there is nothing more to life than picking the world’s bones clean). Whatever violence passed this way is meaningless now. Decay and dereliction crawl broken-limbed and feeble through this man-made desolation that life has abandoned with disdain.
(“This boy is ignorance! This girl is want! Beware them not, now many more are nothingness.”)
Now only they are left; heedless of their amputated hopes, flayed of humanity and spirit, sufficing on the scant leavings of neglect to return always to nothing, and die another day.
Soon it will be dark. I weigh my withered spirit one more time and wonder now (with almost no emotion) whether the time is now? Am I ready now to join my hungry brothers in the dust of the Wastelands of Failure?
THE FLAGELLANT OF THE WASTES
FAILURE…
-The humiliating burden, the excoriating shame. Like a conjoined twin that never lived. A desiccated husk, heavy with parasites and grime; the tumescent fruit of anguish, yet its shrivelled, spindly limbs enfold me tight, nails drawing blood, its dead eyes vacant but for the mute accusation of-
FAILURE…
-An excruciating sun that never sets, gifting cataracts, searing skin and sight, irradiating every recess of existence, so that I crawl prostrate in my exhaustion, a penitent unwelcome at the gates, grovelling in the filth of insufficiency. A scalding night-black tar, hosting the leeches enticed by its cloying scent, bleeding me dry of all but the poison of-
FAILURE…
-The abasing mantra, the code of the prison of my body. My impotent enfeebled rage is a grain of salt, dwindling in a stagnant pool, the bitter tears of frustration and dismay. I drown in its brackish icy murk, crippled by uselessness and pain, dragged down and down and down by the leaden shackles of-
FAILURE…
-To behold aghast as the ugliness within contaminates the wells of others’ lives, spreading the disease of abjection and denial, disfiguring my flesh with the pockmarked scars of-
FAILURE…
-The reward that hope bequeaths to me and others like me, sliding off the razor’s edge to abide among the detritus of this world. To linger, defeated, accursed and purposeless in a lightless place known only to the wretched spectres of-
FAILURE…
PENITENT’S REQUIEM
The storm is closing in once more. Beyond the fractured window, the evening melts and runs like wax, imbibing the unctuous tar of night. As its viscous strands descend between the streetlights the purulent mass of tenements, mouldering into one, peer through blackened apertures with mute suspicion, mottled with the disfigurements of ruin.
The parasites they harbour lurk unseen, slick and clammy from the relentless rains. Flayed absences of face concealed, slimy fungal growths erupting from malformed bodies, disjointed fingers gnarled on shrivelled arms, scrabbling and twitching with the knowledge of your presence…
You cannot see them, but you know they’re there, intolerably waiting.
Swarming furtively through clefts in the crumbling walls, a mass of pullulating bodies, the insidious slither of skin on greasy skin a susurration on the leading edge of silence. A multiplicity of mouths where mouths should never be, agape and slavering with rapt anticipation.
There’s just you and them, and the plague that birthed them.
Something of which you cannot speak, a vast unfathomable foulness that blights your mind with rumour of its coming. Your future is an amputee, a sculpture of dismemberment anointed with the claw-marks of despair.
You as good as grabbed the knives and wrenched them home, embracing each agonising slash.
Existence heaves and writhes its ruined stumps, floundering in the mess of its arterial spray. Trembling and frenzied in an ecstasy of panic, convulsing itself to a ghastly stillness; a grotesque and spoiling carcass. Its sullied blood seeps through your eyelids like muddy cataracts. Your escape routes sealed with its mangled limbs, the severed extremities of hope and faith, entangled and bound in the precious snarls of wire you squirreled away in febrile desperation, knowing that this time would one day come.
Water courses down the spattered walls, bearing the contaminations of this world, glistening slickly through the oppressive murk. You taste its bitter vapour in your throat. In the darkness of your derelict red-brick womb you cringe and shiver in a wretched foetal heap, waiting for the flesh to close over your face, fusing together into one distended swelling. Time festers in an unwholesome stupor, suspended like a cadaver from the gibbet, disintegrating fleshlets consumed by the gnawing void.
As the corruption sluggishly warps your form, the puckered mouth collapsing like an abscess in your chest speaks haltingly of change and the age to come in a voice choked and wet with necrotising tissue, and in helpless captivation you listen to it chitter. As the storm intensifies outside, its whispers fill your ears with admonishments and scorn, and the gurgling of the rain in the swollen gutters sounds unendurably like the laughter of the damned.
EATER OF ASHES
It is the cold that wakes you, shivering under layers of yellowed newspaper, your limbs carving into the filthy mattress. You choke out a painful breath, the exhale coalescing like pollutant seeping from the wreckage of your flesh. The dampness glistens in the gloom; the bodies in the walls are on the move again.
Hunger, a writhing confluence of worms, cripples you with nauseating pain, deep and throbbing in your neglected gut, bidding you to arise for another day, to burrow through the effluent once more for the basest scraps of spoiled and rancid waste, the leavings of the slothful and unclean.
The pre-dusk comedown light oozes through the cracks in the windowpane and peels back the veil on the squalid room. The mangled remains of birds - remnants of feathers in contorted flesh - that you arrayed in decaying vigil
along the dusty, fly-strewn windowsill, warn you by the taste of their silence that you have been watched once more. And a knot of cold anxiety coils in your aching stomach, an inert serpent of gnawing doubt, eating you from the inside, slowly, slowly, as the worm devours the corpse.
Wrapping your tattered rags around you, you pore over the mouldering boards and the ugly dark smudges - sigils in blood and ash - that you smeared protectively around the doorframe against the dying of the blight. They glower with the threat they represent. You daub another pattern with dismay and scatter your scent along the step to seal against the harbingers of the real…those who would confine you to shape and form, the suppurating bindings of a dead identity that it pleasured you to shred.
With your last shard of precious mirror you carve words into the crumbling plaster, over and over and over and over, murmuring a litany of half-remembered names under your shallow fevered breath, fingering the gouges with bloodied digits from floor to ceiling, head spinning with fatigue. And before you know it, the night has collapsed round you, exhaustion binding you in suffering.
But you know the time is right.
The power of the names compels you, withholding the forms that shift within the walls, protecting you for one more night.
With a dead rat’s broken body cradled gently in one shaking hand to guide you to the feeding grounds of the vermin and diseased, you squeeze your emaciated form through the fissure in the bricks to the derelict house beyond, burnt-out and strewn with needles; abandoned by even the abandoned, shunned by even the shunned…
(Ah! Blessed temple and asylum!)
The tiny delicate skulls you mounted on twigs indifferently watch you leave and await your return with the patience of the dead.
THE POINT OF NO RETURN
Soon it will be dark. The future has foundered on withered limbs that can no longer bear the weight of the tumourous blights distorting its frail form. Soon it will be dark and I will feel the impulse like a hook in my repellent flesh, and my struggles will weaken, as I know they will.
The wait is almost over.
I peer down again through the smears on my window, choked by resignation, an unwilling voyeur; I cannot help myself. Clinging to the crumbling frame like the last shreds of desperation, my eyes red and sleep-deprived, my mouth dry and bitter with the aftertaste of plague. The hours buzz by like flies, signifying nothing, prolonging the inevitable - the dread, leaden in my mind, of giving up entirely - snuffing the guttered candle of a squandered existence.
A bruised smudge of sky contaminates the light. A limitless ocean of rubble, like petrified concrete bodies protruding from poisoned earth…a desert of broken glass and refuse…the Wastelands of Failure that gnaw the stark horizon. Smoke hangs lifeless in the distance like the harbinger of cancer that long since ate the world away and despoiled its hope-stained husk, anaesthetised by the incessant clamour of trains that never stop…
(With indifferent metallic shrieks they roar contemptuously by, like fever-dreams of searing light that lacerate the jaundiced skin of the noxious urban dusk. Like the whiplash of sardonic fate across the tortured scar tissue of this place which is no place…)
Soon it will be dark, and when the streetlights leak sulphur like malignant thuribles, THEY will one by one emerge from whatever sordid trench they call their own, malnourished, graceless and grotesque, oblivious to others of their kind. Some flounder, crawl and scrabble, incapable of any more. Scavenging leftover scraps of life, sifting through the wreckage for the most wretched fragments, shedding tatters of psyche. Mud-larks of the pollution age; shrivelled, emaciated things in a uniform of rags and grime pore over bloodstained tarmac (mute and uncomprehending, when there is nothing more to life than picking the world’s bones clean). Whatever violence passed this way is meaningless now. Decay and dereliction crawl broken-limbed and feeble through this man-made desolation that life has abandoned with disdain.
(“This boy is ignorance! This girl is want! Beware them not, now many more are nothingness.”)
Now only they are left; heedless of their amputated hopes, flayed of humanity and spirit, sufficing on the scant leavings of neglect to return always to nothing, and die another day.
Soon it will be dark. I weigh my withered spirit one more time and wonder now (with almost no emotion) whether the time is now? Am I ready now to join my hungry brothers in the dust of the Wastelands of Failure?