Garden of Delights

Dead flowers exhale where beauty
decays. The grey miasmas of the
dying permeate, penetrate and
pervade the air; and the seething
ground, already sepulchral, heaves with
hasty putrefaction, as the spirit is uprooted by
some unclean calloused hand.
Vermin consume the
living, as bloated bodies deny
their offspring. Faces of the newborn
stare lifelessly through livid blades
and everywhere the stench of
death lingers. Here is one whose limbs,
highways for narcotics, have become
atrophied under a pallid
moon. Another who, without living
means, sold her body for the
children she never
birthed; their cries wail through rank beds of
rottenness, but there is no returning, for
her or for them. In some lonely corner sits
one who drank her own demise
after she was left alone; there are many
such.
Madness grips others: one cannot walk
forward, only back; yet she may not return to
childhood’s end. There lies one whose ending came
by her own
hand, having lost all brightness forever. Another,
whom faith left, left life.
Yet one more, whose chronic pain and self-loathing
closed the curtain on her unseen play.
Through this dismal morass crawls a noisome giant,
swollen and putrid, its pincers clicking scissor-like in the
tenebrous gloom, its tentacles dripping with
ghastly venom.
It consumes
all…and then comes Night.