Caged comes in many forms
The omen needle into eardrome

The sour scum parasitic
So snaking ‘round guts

Slow churning
Fast burning—a scry o’ rock
Licked new for the poisoned bite
Of Adam’s apple metamorphose rite

Imprisoned songbirds
They are barred
I see, I witness, I inquire loud:

“What purpose does a song have,
If not to pine for the window
Before the wings were lost?”

Thralldom has a taste
Ebony leech muscles drain the strength to
Pull and push and palpitate

Sticksome strings webbing slaving chains amass’d
Here at tied wrists mine insides do quake do ache
Like shivering drawn moving works of blown-glass

So again, this third eye
This swelled orb that leaks

In the bondage of sanct’
Rotting vectors crept foreordain’t
Gleeful to mind, hungry for fate

Calcifying in camaraderie
The Gogh, the Kevorkian
Sylvia stuffed in an oven
Prometheus liver taken warm

Chthonian beings snapping
Two fanged below
Hungry gods suckling on harvested teats of woe

Knelt weeping under the holy shadow
I was there
O’ dearest, crumbling Colossus of Rhodes
Clapped asunder, I still sense
The flowering phantasms deep

Down and down
And down into
Sparkplug darkness, all sensory t’pique

Where now redcoats march
As electrolytes of antiquity
—so many deaths I die
I have not the skill nor iron
To perform otherwise

Had I known birth itself was a scar
I would have laid hidden
But ‘tis done

I can not sink
Can not yield
Writhing from every sniff of the lung

Cursed to born and born and
Gouge forth new in each havoc song

Saturn’s child reaped from empyrean’s wheat
Nerve endings firing, bloody organ pumping bare

Shackled to life
Somber clinking from Nyx’s womb night
Here am I, still alive—l’héritier solitaire.