Meridians of Melolight

As published in Reinventing Myths (Mytho-मंथन), Authorspress. December 11, 2016.

–A vagrant figure, heaven-cleft, wailing moons at the feet of a bronze shrine, mourns in shrouded desolation–

SCENE: The break, bleak is cast asunder, cold-ridden by the dawn’s rays; the hallow’d light creeps through the glass roof—spearing spirited veins of the hanging garden’s flora with fire. Existence itself is fickle-caught and suffocating as the thorny flowers drink their dark matter illuminate and strangle the sweetest angel stony without the simplest of thoughts.

“This

tent

to curl, unfurled

Serpent-cursed beggars

Star-bent, fury wicked;

With God’s anvil,

Looming as hoary sin,

Above them

And

Caught between coils of the sun—

The coin-handlers rest,

powerless, petrified

as beads of salt-cracked wine

Chapped miser’d &

Poured wanton’d

upon

The dread agony of

Lips that speak of the listless sea:

Drunk, aloof

In leagues dark & heavenly damn’d

—forgotten, enflamed—

They

Kissed to crimson decay, rotted.

I, fated as one

Chapel’d by this oblivion

In the blackest of hearts just,

Walk a-cast the spotted-flames of a leopard,

Decaled in death,

If only to know you again.”

II.

Spiritedness dwindling,

a fell of wing’d aftermath,

Corpses & carrion afoul,

As sparks burst forth discordant

And He, the vagrant, ensnared,

speaks His discontents—

lost

meandering & morose

most

His solitude surrenders, serenely;

dwarf starr’d, white, and dogg’d—

melancholic, masterful

His heart howls,

pierced psychotic,

And the world

stares back

With widow’d hope, triumphant.

Vexed, this figure crestfallen,

a Vampyre

Wrought viscous in virtue-violent,

& bespoke by blood

(lawful, chaotic, compassionate)

Takes to the light,

Eviscerated—

A flash,

A vision—

side

speaks fired piety:

tent

Rise

for

That mercy-cruelty,

Split-silver as sacrifice sanguine,

severed your mortality,

mangled and matted

as you were, from brutish hands beating—

Each wild act, a gift unfathomable,

scaring you with a sense

of Justice indomitable.

So bloodied be, you reaped the hollows of hell,

test

[1]

III.

Fire

The fathomless fright of flesh, malign’d

by the meridians of melolight;

Lo! A sinister-sick disregard for self—

inside Him soars double-down’d

like

Seeking warmth wicked

Amidst the spark and ash, emblazoned!

“Burn, beast within,

Be-lighted by burdens—

Burn

Screams murder, murder

by light’s horrendous hand,

Cooled betwixt wrath indiscriminate & kind…

Alone, I stand:

This wound, willful & wrench’d,

Wrought by the Sun’s talons eagled

That tear my sinews clean and constant;

The anguish a fitting recompense

for bravery long emboldened and lost.”

Shadow-felled, sun-beaten,

Scorched therein—

tent

Spared!

As a vagrant, freed & refuged

within the suffocatingly sublime & serene

of darkness, beholden by nightingales and odes, dreamy.

Yes, yes! Songs sojourn… each lyric of the Just, a-lit perpetual!

Heed

sweet and sorrowful semblances—

Let go, let reign & unleash

So shatters his soul tempest-tempered & true,

As he forces fate’s bondage

to bow before him and his epithet, written:

“I, Nashir—
First of His Kind, Vampyre;
Kindred of Samæl;
The Sun-Touched Storm-Breaker—
Instauro Vitam [2],
VMMMDCCCXXIV.”

[1] Samæl here refers to a mythological figure (an allusion) as well as the name for another character, who himself is a dæmon—that concept having originated from Greek mythology but here has been reimagined within the poem’s story-world as a master species for all supernatural beings/creatures. Each dæmon is a hybrid entity, having access to and being limited by the forms/races that it rules over. Dæmons themselves are a powerful divine essence/identity that coexists with a sentient host. “Samæl” translates as “Venom of God,” and he is the only higher angel in traditional Jewish lore who is both good and evil. Samæl gives the gift of vampyrism to Nashir in order to spare his life and transform him into a vessel of Justice—to see sparks of change happen in this timeline of eternity.

[2] Instauro Vitam is Latin for “I renew/restore life.” This term is used within the series to mark the transfiguration date of the mortal into a vampyre much like anno Domini, or rather A.D. It represents the new life and rebirth of the vampyre into the world of the Aristosis, or rather creation itself and the lived universes within the poem’s cosmology. The Roman numerals come out to 8824 years.