Free Gathered Dust and Others by W. H. Pugmire Page B

limbs are démodé, where pangs of fleshy pain are but a jest bequeathed by mirthless gods.  I will dance as I eschew oxygen for that other element.
    Yet I, still pressed upon this solid ground, cannot ascend unto yon floating clouds, and my one task is to claw into the mud in which I write your immemorial name, the name that once more I call to those dark clouds with mouth that sucks in the current of this paltry age.  I ache to suck a rarer clime, where I can drift as acolyte of smoke among the nightmares of an alien dimension, where earth and its happy doom is but a memory that makes me chuckle into the void – the endless abyss in the gulf of night where I would waft with chilly cosmic tempest that is the exhalation from your maw, that mouth with which you speak my mortal name and claim me as your own.
    II.
    I cannot see the flowers at my feet, the emblems of remembrance at my tomb, for smoke and shadow cloud what once were eyes; but I can sense the soft bouquet of rose and smell the wilted lily’s rank decay.  I drift through weightless air on buoyant feet until I find again the gems that were your eyes, jewels that burn with self-substantial fire, ignition that pronounces you a god, embedded in your basalt eidolon.  I fall to shattered knee on polished floor of one posthumous place, a floor that is littered by the remembrance of flowers from your once-living devotee.  She could not last forever.  Had I lips I would moan your name as dark psalm, the name I almost seem to recollect, that once I whispered in the realm of life.  Although we both are dead, dread lord, I heard your uncanny call in termination’s dusk, and from my final slumber I awakened, to rise from rotted wood and strata of earth, to you and to a memory of life.  I thought in death to become a thing of air, lifted from the elements of time; but I am still a creature of debris, transformed into neglected dust and mud.  Like you, I am forgotten and bereft.  Like you, I find no solace in the worm.  To you I would exhale liturgical utterance and clasp my hands in unholy solitude.  Yet I am but a puppet of the grave, animated by your alchemy, and all that I can offer you, dread lord, is veneration of a hollow heart, and veneration from a mouth of filth that falls more apart with each impotent whimper, until I am returned to my filthy bed, where I will worship you if I am able, wrapped with worms.
    III.
    I breathe into the fitful air as the alchemy of consumption has begun, as all my physicality wastes away, as I become an element of air until I am an exhalation lifting to the skies, a vapor in a draft of wind.  As I evaporate into the clouds, like some meditation on mortality, I take on the aspect of a whispered word that may, by chance, be nothing but a name, a name that one may whisper in a prayer to some strange thing beyond sane dimension, a power pulsing in-between the stars into which my essence is inhaled.  I filter through the clouds now wet with rain, like some forgotten word once writ on water, forgotten by the faces far below that open mouths so as to drink the downpour, mouths that cannot remember me with speaking.  And thus I drift in anonymous void, like some sad ghost that has lost its earthly hold, and fly toward the thing that, pulsing, sucks me into nothingness divine.  And there I am surrounded by rare sparks, ignition that issues from a flaming throne, where chaos chatters idiotically, and the Strange Dark One offers me a pipe, which taking I press to malformed mouth, so as to join the disturbance that makes the dark air tremble, the psalm of sound that will go on and on, beyond the death of time.
    IV.
    We climb the haunted hill to its highest tip, to one place where memory is entombed beneath the clouds, those clouds that seem to form fantastic beings who watch our secret play.  The thing reclines upon the tabletop tomb where once it ate, where once it had been eaten, long ago.  Its hollow bones are blanched by burning