I sought you in hubristic stations
Of our own devoured dimension
Halls condemned with blood and flame
Man’s marvels ruptured and oozing
I felt along the steely walls and
Sat beneath infernal obelisks of
Human ambition and shame
I thought I smelled your wake
As I shrank with fear in the dark
But only I was there. You were not.

I sought you in a forgotten fane
Where demons hung in a violet sky
And slithered through a fetid moat
While Cephas wailed forever on the walls
Deep therein I found an angry weapon
Carved and charred on an altar of pain
It rose red from its quivering theca
Birthing stars that fell like hammers
It spoke to me of things I won’t recall
Were you there? Not at all.

I sought you in a nighted citadel
Whelmed in the dim cascade of space
There the beasts were frozen through
The gaping walls spat rusted barbs
And pillared rooms hid tomes and death
In its starlit atheneum I read of
Carnage in a thousand sordid futures
And learned the hated truths of existence
My vision white, my crimson gun alight
Ice and iron alike were a mane flowing
Deeper into the brazen fires of Hell
But hide nor hair. You were not there.

I sought you in a storm’s blue eye
A place of repose where tortured minds
Wander in vain on spidery legs or
Waft in skulls crowned with noxious fire
I found another weapon there immured
A cannon made by men for Armageddon
God’s open eye, blinking and rolling
A worthy prize of war despoiled twice
My burden now. Mine by bloody right.
It brought the quietus the spirits sought
But you weren’t in peace. All for naught.

I sought you in a theater of lies
Where the air was a fecund haze and
The floors were slick with spilled seed
As I crept, guns bared, the wind swelled and
Birthed scores of Hell’s cloven nobles to
Fire the Great Tresspasser in their arena
Under the dread of my twin furies
They fell screaming on their ample guts and
Crawled back to the miasmatic womb
To fetch their father, the Lord Golem
Whose chest I pulped and wrathful arm I siezed
But you? Like the empty breeze.

I sought you in a broken place
The churning atrium of Hell’s inmost dens
Where the static crosstalk of hopes lost
Were flies that buzzed in the shifting walls
Digesting mortal clarity with vomit and
Burying the last secret beneath their shit
Long I walked their halls, wrathful arm aloft
My shadow long and sharp, my lips twisted tight
My eyes bright and darting, demons fleeing my sight
I knocked on those walls until Hell turned tail
Revealing a final door in its calcified folds
The walls broke. Beelzebub’s legions coiled skyward
But you weren’t there. I knocked twice.

I sought you in Dis, the Cathedral of Doors
The last bastion of inhuman wickedness
Where absolution is sintered with brimstone
And twisted traitors circle the Hellmother backwards
Bemoaning losses they no longer remember
They died again as I arrived, the nave fell silent
Hell above became a crypt, dry and dark and quiet
As the Hellmother rose from her throne of tears
I wrapped my blackened hands around her throat
To squeeze you free from her rancid bosom
She croaked havoc and the doors flew open
All of Hell was bared like her empty breasts
But no god or ghost or demon came to aid her
We were alone, my hands her only dying company
When she went limp I cast her down and ground
Her head against the sulfurous bedrock
Spilling her brains from her eyes
As I had thought, you weren’t inside.