Coiled, coiling, and fleeing himself,
Twisting, writhing, slithering, sliding,
The whirligig wriggler, headless and heedless—
Who can count his clattering scales?
Who can bear their rattling din?
—Devouring all breath, still and quick:
His eyes are onyx and his fangs opal,
His venom, ancient and strange:
A flowing primordial deluge into his twitching tail.
Even with a severed neck,
Unknowing, with an unknown head,
He bites now and will bite again.
He will gnash toothless and breathless snarl.
He will rage at the end of ending.
And in his fury, amid the shrieks of all flesh—
In the deafening moaning of man,
Each soul is hurled from on high into this crypt—
This crypt atop the shards of the shrine—
The shrine of the house,
The house of the Master, austere and weird,
The Master of awful ways and wayward wights—
Wights besouled, and wights benothinged—
We, the wights: we are deposited.
We, the wretched: we are exhaled.
We are deposited on dust and exhaled as ash,
To twist in wombs, to writhe through gates,
To slither about this sphere, all askew, and to slide beneath its skin
We, imitātiōnēs vermis, are consigned to forget and to be forgotten,
Fleeing, coiled—as blurry, crumpled forms—
Excreted breech from the maw of the Most High
And forthwith beheaded.
We are told ere times old:
All that is, once was not,
All that is, will be no longer,
And as an ashen sun falls into an impossible horizon,
And all of what man was is scraped from the temple floor,
And the great scales, once howling, shudder their last,
All that will remain
Will be the hiss.