Poem - Constructing the Eidolon

Constructing the Eidolon
by Joel Bradley

They came.
From the dark, into the dark, unto the dark.
They came.

The twilight a-mutter with incantations that poison the lips that speak.
Dirty hands, countless, clutching talismans of sympathy.
Knotted wood and serpentine roots,
sun-bleached bones, and the misshapen skulls of questionable beasts,
still dressed in tatters of desiccated flesh.
The feathers of nightbirds,
twisted scraps of rusted metal,
and sharp teeth found among the flowers.
Stones from river and mountain,
sand from desert and sea,
the dust and ash of volcano and tomb.
Rainbows of shards and splinters from shattered cathedral windows,
and a thousand crooked pins and broken keys.
Some give up their own flesh and organs,
Still beating, held out or aloft in trembling hands,
libating mortal dusts with the vital wines of life and death.
Others fling their contributions of excrement and corruption,
administering medicinal draughts of piss and bile,
spitting curses and vomiting dogma.
The kingly title of the fool’s reproach upon a bifurcate tongue in a solitary mouth.
A prayer that echoes the void - God Naming Himself.

The nimble fingers of dark artisans
mingle the mud and meat and morbidity,
Smearing black pastes over bone and stone,
tying hair, binding skin, winding sinew and vine,
constructing the eidolon of revelation.
The manifest answer to a desperate invocation.

The frame of a fiend in the light of a long-dreaded morn,
swathed in moth-eaten shrouds, phosphorescent fungi adorns
the crown of malformed horns and brutal thorns,
and the face a black mirror, swallowing the light of the dawn.

 

 

This is a very recent poem. It flowed out after a long period in deep darkness, brought to the fore with the aid of wine, cannabis and opium. Something of a way-marker. But we're not out of the woods yet.
-JB