Page Twelve Poem by B. Sven Telander

Conundrum at dusk for the oracle echo,
so tired of capacious bedevilment,
predictable desideratum, plectics and period doubling,
tenebrous dilettantes’ curse,
fluent and refluent detrition,
liquescent shifting templates,
blooming albescent terminus,
natural batiked labyrinths,
man-made mazes for the ongoing construction
of the ultimate hide-and-seek divertissement,
burning driven cravings, deep insistent needs,
an insidious creeping erosion of soul,
otiose withering of will,
parlous hours countless with swarming galvanic fears
a cyclothymic voracious surrounding cloud of mosquitoes perpetually biting,
empty vacant drained in blah nada wind,
delirium to be lost in order to enjoy challenge of finding:
they slept for nine illucid years and when again awake
the hunger ravenous as cancer;
ceaseless feeding proved triumphant over what seemed
never ending weakness they feared could not be overcome,
no farewell to diabolism; gargling blood with the violent majority,
thanks given as a paraphrase homage
to dead Master Vladimir in palpations during the next eighty-two words:
ending of calamitous vacation, hammered and nailed among Armageddon Trudge, planning from intermittent buses heading through mystery tours, stumbling into dull dioramas, blurry tourist villages, existing in continuous gloom of bodily weariness they ran; and the more they ran it was certain that what pushed them further was an entity more than silly dressed jester with hodge-podge of assorted moving trash- a thing more than metaphor, a thing hideous and unfaceable, a hulk without veneer, a time of forever nightmare still hurtling
- unsatiated, cold savage and changed,
twisted dwelling in a relatively peaceful solitary melancholy
replaced, exchanged, perverted, consumed, converted, transformed
into angry places of unquenchable frenzied bloodlust
in realms of unsquelchable persistent rage
they wandered the world;
floating in puddle that was only growing larger,
runnels flowing into tunnel that turned into a sewer;
strange even crueler things were swimming ever closer
and they struggled for more freedom but only sailed deeper
into bowels under maximum city
where those dark furious things take shelter,
the eidolon creatures chased them in the dendronic filth web
and they one by one were vanquished
until just a single child remained
who kept spinning arabesques through the aqueous tunnels
screaming with her echo which got stronger before fainter;
the precient sores expand, the incunabulum wounds deepen,
torment and turmoil rule the way, an almost limitless fury
shapes days in permutations and variations of mayhem;
quixotic tricks of mutilation and arrogant madness dictate intrigues,
motivate shirred stealth of whispers,
prideful silence of horripilative ways,
self-organized friable criticality,
subtle machinations churn behind bulbous walls
of the obvious complex historical dimensions of evolutions patterns;
in time the child made a harmonium bargain
with the Suzerainty of Darkness
and all the things that called it home;
with this clonic new necrotic acceptance
she found peace with what was missing:
the hollow shadow, memory of a memory,
end of certitude, ceremony of opposites;
Luna and Sol, Ares and Aphrodite,
death rebirth and dissolution renewal,
triumph or defeat, putrefaction generation,
this pyrrhic victory in Gideon’s Den;
and didn’t long for light now or the life that lay above,
for old ravagement sanctum in the blackness
claimed her as totally as it had all her delicious new companions:
a univocal shrieking pantheon
of pain-inflictors and lovers-of-hurting,
imago scruttators, the Vermin Men and Scavenger Women
in the Coliseum of the Forgotten,
card carrying members of the Lunacy Commission,
would-be soothsayers seeking omens, sortilege, augury,
and spontaneous divination at the Skin Game Temple in Chronopoly,
attending Epilepticon for opportunities to peruse and gloat over
any slight discrepancies in the Registry of Scars.