"Abdication"

#0041. The rabbit gives up its kingdom for an ounce of fear. Now, after abdicating its glorious throne, it huddles, nervously, twitchy and sweet. It knows what it means, now, to be alive. It feels fear coursing through its veins, and it isn't the ice water of supremacy. It's like liquid influenza. Hot and cold simultaneously. Every movement, every sound, makes him bound away. There is no trace left of the emperor.

"Charles Dann"

#0042. This is the face. Greeted him. Sorry. Out of breath from singing. This is the face that greeted him in the morgue. Stolen materials. Legally gained. Not stolen. But this is the face that greeted him and so what now? Every day is an opportunity to limit and degrade another person. Charles Dann died from what he acquired. His face froze up. His limiters returned his possessions too late. They all wound up in the grave.

"A Repository of Miracles"

#0043. Everywhere he wanders he sees a similar sight. The steeples rise up, towering over clusters of modest homes and brick boxes. They collect incomes of weary people. They stay with you while you die and they will give your body a home to rest. Wherever the congregation moves to, a new steeple arises, almost like it's planted. A dingy sunflower rising up and drawing in a host like bees to nectar. He wants to want to go in, but the smell alone is enough to keep him from the threshold.

"Caged Birds Do Not Sing, They Multiply"

#0044. His freedom came at spectacular cost. Those dark nights of moving along poorly lit sidewalks, arms and eyes bloodied, fill him with nostalgia. He thought drugs were a cheat to it. A hoax university. Insight, he believed, required suffering. And he suffered and saw the visions of it without aid. He saw the line of birds on the outside, waiting for him. Prison became an objective. The birds still sang in their cages, he thought. These birds, though, were outside the entire time.

"A Fairy Tale of Rot"

#0045. Below ground she decomposes. Her face had once held beauty to rival Rose White, her brain had charm and cunning like a relentless wolf, she was brave as any Jack to climb a beanstalk. But she lost her fight. Witches or cancer. Dragons or kidney disease. Nothing matters. All of her adventuring spirit, all of her accuracy with the bow and arrow, all of her clever puzzle solving, witty disassembly of riddles, horseback riding, prince saving prowess, none of it matters. She is like the dullard once they're both in the ground.

"Origins"

#0046. I met Alice while traversing the Sea. Overwhelmed by the dreaming Mantas, manipulated by the nightmare-inducing Lampreys. The Jellies were there, too, and from the sound of it, they were always there. Amorphous, grotesque, shifting like perception. We didn't speak. But they filled the waters. They populated the Sea. I worry that they are thinking in a way not unlike we think.

"All the Worries are Worries You Should Have"

#0047. She permeates everything. The thread wound through each world, and the thread tied to every limb. She looks out from others' eyes. She sits atop a throne at the end of time. She looks out from others' eyes. When you look at someone you love and you do not recognize them. When they seem so alien to you. It is then that she is inside of them. God is looking at you through someone else's eyes.

"Plucked from Memory"

#0048. I say too often, but not incorrectly, that memory is all you are. You are nothing more than the sum total of your memories. The daft thing is, of course, that your memories are all wrong. You've accidentally lied to yourself repeatedly throughout the course of your life. You are your memory, and your memory is wrong.

"My Lost Tribe"

#0049. I am so hostile. I drive away my loved ones. I am bitter and I am mean. I am so lonely, but nobody is worth the effort. I find myself drawn to strangers because I do not yet know how awful I will come to believe they are. I am looking for a tribe to be part of. I am looking for my people. But my people are isolationists. I will never be able to find them because they certainly do not wish to be found.

"Alice in the Celestial Throneroom"

#0050. She shows me things I am not meant to see. And she knows it will torment me, because I cannot do those things justice in words and there are no photographs to share. Heavenly. Unfathomable. I die to see this. My heart it stops dead in my chest and I die just to see the things she'll show me. Torturous as it is, I keep on dying. I cannot explain it, but I can experience it.

"Cheating on the Test"

#0051. He was around even before the imprisonment. Melancholy (The Clown) sat next to him in the school room and whispered the answers to every test. The answers were invariably incorrect. This was a source of constant amusement to the two of them, that they would cheat and score worse marks than they would have gotten just adhering to the rules.

"The Celestial Giant"

#0052. The unearthly howl sits with me forever. I heard that horrible sound traverse the stars. It chills me, racks me down to the spine. I have never been so afraid as that night and I am always afraid. The thing is as old as time. It stands at the edge of space. It stands apart from all things. It cries out in absolute agony. I can feel the Giant's torment. I can feel its isolation. To be so alien, to be so foreign. It has no place in the universe. It howls and it howls and it howls and all I can do is shutter my ears.

"Itchy and the Duality of Sphinxes"

#0053. We drive towards an ending always driving toward an ending driving outward inward, I forgot where my eyes were falling, I forgot where I could consider the downturn, to the outside, to the inside... It's the duality of Sphinxes, their monstrousness and their civilization. They startle too easily and give you the riddle. But they want you to answer correctly. Like Phillip Regis. They root for you. The ending falters. They sputter at your ignorance. You fail and the failure ends you. They seem so monstrous but they did not want you to end.

"Relic"

#0054. It's all that survived. The limbs gone. The soft body burned to ash. Porcelain survives. Covered in soot. Dirty and marked and left in the ruins. It floats. It is the remnant of a home, of a life. It watched Death ride in on the smokey whirlwind and rip the breath from lungs, singe the flesh from bones, and leave nothing but it behind. Nobody dares tread on the fragile relic. It witnessed too much.

"The Spirit that You Venerate Only Wants to See You Die"

#0055. There is a spirit to it that you think has some sort of benevolence. You believe it is greater than you, but part of you all the same. You walk into its realm. You run your toes through wet, soft grass. You bask in sunlight. You breathe deep the air. But do you see what lies in wait? The blood sucking ticks clinging to you, driving fangs into your skin. The sun boils out cancer from your flesh. The air carries invisible agents of disease. You think you are a part of it. You think there is balance to it. But all that the spirit wants is to see you dead.

"Holy Infant"

#0056. I close my eyes and I see all of that history drizzle out before me. I don't know how to handle this. I dream when I'm awake. I see the eyes of the Holy Infant flutter and shut. His mouth opens to speak, but the words are too hushed to hear. I dream when I'm awake, I think, but it may just be that I cannot stay awake. The Holy Infant is cradled in my arms. I have wronged him, somehow. Remember that old hymn? "I crucified thee."

"Alice at the End of All Things"

#0057. Across the aeons and still she waits, older than time itself, older than the Giant, older than evil, older than anything. She stands watch at the end of all things. From my cell, in between circlets of stars and stumbling starved, I can see the end of all things. In the dirty and blood smeared concrete of the cell floor, I see the end of all things. She is there, waiting with the key. She will usher me out and across some great divide of primal static. She is unending. She will hold my hand through my ending.

"The Priests that Dwell Forever in Chains"

#0058. The Priests usher us when Alice fails to hold our hands. They are conduits, the speakers on behalf of all that is. They will die like I will die. They will die like all things will die. But their eyes, blinded by the light of Alice, are privy to all the secrets that she knows. They listen intently, forever in darkness. Quill. Codex. Plates of hammered copper and gold. They listen and they write the secrets she whispers. The Priests are held in the secret place. Chained up and withering but aware of all the things that are. They are bound to secrecy, but they will still hold your hand.

"Riot"

#0059. Reality bends them and forces them into subservience. Like all who breathe, these children are knocked about by gales and tossed into tempest, powerless and abandoned and orphaned. They rise up from quagmire pits in unison, but they are cast back down by the fog and the rain. They cannot hold their own. They will eventually fall into the pit and they will be too weak and too tired to crawl back up again. Their ending will come too slowly. No matter what they try.

"The Forest of Urchins"

#0060. Fallen in to the icy depths, I am plunging. The starlight overhead is nothing and I am chilled to the bone in absolute heavy blackness. Fallen in. The air works out of me. I am cinder block, pulled with a mighty rush by gravity, down into the forest of urchin spines at the bottom of the Sea.

"Epiphany"

#0061. Everything is a story because we are programmed to believe everything is a story. Narrative controls us. Resolution compels us. We moved as automatons toward conflict. We will be dragged under by our need, our necessity, for a cohesive story, for order, for consistency. We will look for patterns in nonsense. Our brains will fill in the gaps between the panels. We are all coauthors of Alice's terrible book.

"The Things at the Periphery are Now at the Gate"

#0062. In the tomb, the nightmares are more prevalent. They were always a plague but they are worse as the walls close in and the air escapes into nothingness. In the prison, he sees everything as a threat. He is protective but does not understand what he is protecting, nor what is protecting from. These beasts roam the periphery of his skull. They are all knowing, omniscient in their world, because they are servitors of his own treasonous brain. They form an army on his outskirts. They roll up their siege tower to his gates and prepare to starve him to death.

"The Child"

#0063. The Child was not his. Nor was it hers. It existed like the Holy Infant, motherless and fatherless and old before it could speak. He wonders if he should have bothered to make a life, to give a legacy to his genes, to give longevity to his name. The Child squawks in horror, not human sounds, and it terrifies the man who is not his father. He blesses his decision. The cell is so cold. The Child wanders free through the prison looking for someone in need of immortality.

"White Gloves Bloodied on a Filthy Face"

#0064. So many faces. Too many faces. The Clown. The Jester. The Entertainer. The Philosopher. The Puppeteer. Who made Melancholy be all of these things? He tumbles into view. His perpetual grin is mortifying. Lift up your countenance upon him. He came to the Funeral. He chased down the violator. In the midst of gravestones and obelisks, the white gloved fists of Melancholy broke apart the face of the violator like a rotten egg. His friendship is frightening, but not unwelcome.

"Lift Up and Rise and See All That has Been Opened to You"

#0065. You find salvation in the most humble of spaces. The inside sprawls like the blue book map of catacombs. Do you remember that blue book? The map was printed in sepia ink. The book fell apart after one reading. I remember it so well, but I cannot recall the name.

"I am Trying to Disbelieve, but I am in Constant State of Failure"

#0066. You won't be surprised by my admissions. I am secretly ruled by order. I want to abandon myself in mysteries, but I am locked up by my very stalwart and hearty fears. They keep the monsters at bay, even as they act like a beacon to the horrid things that live in the corners of my eyes. I am in a state of constant belief and denial. This uncertainty is a terrible defense. There are so many flaws in my armor. The horrors get through time and again before I an remember that I do not believe in them.

"Ex Nihilo"

#0067. Alice creates Life from nothing. Ex nihilo. Her children are less competent at combing elements to novel ends. We simulate Life, but we are unable to fabricate it, whole cloth, from scratch. We are not the master engineers we claim to be. We stitch together monsters and light them up with thunderbolts from the sky. We sculpt creatures from ash and clay, from what used to be a living, laughing being, and we imbue it with a new soul, binary, good or evil. One or zero. The Engineers are baffled by spontaneous Life. There's no need to cling to our composition, though. We will rot as surely as this poor fish will rot.

"Broke Down Interim"

#0068. Anywhere can be the tomb. Anywhere can be the prison. He breaks from traveling long enough to look into the clouded windows. Abandoned. Empty rooms. Tables overturned. Chairs smashed. The ghosts of revelry. The door is locked, but loose on its hinges. He has spent too many days in the wilderness. The wilderness is a boundless prison, he thinks. When you are separated from your god, all things are a prison. All space is a tomb. He lies among the wreckage. He stares into the crumbling plaster of the ceiling. Aged things crawl into him. The ghosts are dust and cobweb. He stares into the crumbling plaster of the ceiling.

"Mulciber"

#0069. She was a wreck and he was a wreck and he thought, maybe, she could float upon him instead of drowning in the same Sea that he did. He spent nights on the edge of the water, and she preceded his stint in the tomb. Her heart was broken. Jangled jattered nervous twitch and the voice raked over by cigarettes. Her heart was a broken glass bottle. Shards of it fell from her fingertips. Her embraces were cold. She never really wanted his help. She was too stuck to turn it down. She would have gladly held his head underwater. One day she just shattered into a million pieces. One day just turned into gleaming dust.

"The Gap Maws and Contracts and There is No Time to Lose"

#0070. Passing between worlds. Life does not root in all things. At the end of all things we see the light unknowable. Passing between worlds is a frightening ordeal. The trial is devastating. Hearts stop just to witness. The Priests may hold your hand, but likely, you will come alone with two silver coins in your tightly knit palm. What's real phases out of sight and your mind is dissolved in the aether. What will you be when everything about you is lost and out of focus?

"The Ageless Rose"

#0071. In the Waiting Room, the anteroom of a secret place, the Ageless Rose blooms perpetually behind glass. It blossoms in the vitrine, never touched, never watered, never seeing any sunlight. It is the thing he wants to be. Isolated and beautiful. You can see through the window, but inside the world is self contained. The Ageless Rose, if it can see at all, cannot see through the barrier. For all it knows, it is the only thing in the world.

"Waiting for a Shoulder on Which to Perch"

#0072. It has become common to not believe in evil. It has become common to paint cruelty and devastation with a brush of compassion and empathy, seeking humane ground, seeking knowledge, understanding, connectivity. Evil gets relegated to simplistic folk, people too ignorant and guileless to perceive the gray nuance of existence. But it is another lie. Dirty things, lies. Evil is real. It lives among you. It hops from shoulder to shoulder. Devils pull at your beard. Devils lick salt from your weeping eyes. They are there in the hearts of oppressors and instigators to violence. Ignore the Devils at your peril. But, no, you ignore that at all of our peril.

"Alistair by the Lamppost"

#0073. Outside the anteroom of the secret place is Alistair, he is a friendly face, so sadly drunken. He spills secrets because his mind is addled. Sad thing, that. Such a waste. Friendly face. Sadly stumbling. This is all it is, that's his big secret. To endure you need to waste yourself. Burn up in the atmosphere or live immortal in the wallow. He knows the right choice. He gives the answer to anyone who will ask. He is the reason I can hear the Giant's cry from the edge of space. Alistair is everyone. I am as foreign to him as he is to me. He's the one who's not alone.

"Alice Towers Above All Else"

#0074. Come listen. She speaks so much. She speaks so quickly. She has no fear in her. What could she fear? The morning I met her, she had rode across the Sun in some flaming chariot. She had settled warfare and famine and pestilence and even death. She was so beautiful. She shimmered angelic. She brought with her no host of heaven. Just porcelain face. Porcelain hands. You've been away too long she said to me. And I knew she was correct. But she still can never answer my question of Dear Alice, what, pray tell, is the point of it all?

"Elisabeth and Wiley"

#0075. Do not thank me, she says to him. The Mountain is immobile. I could not pass it without help, he says to her. She demurs. The Mountain is immobile. The two stand at the only pass. Elisabeth knows the way well. In those dangerous reaches, she prays to a god that Wiley cannot believe in. They don't move of their own accord. Each little step is orchestrated by a higher power. If they knew, they would just fall down and let the gods do all the lifting.

"The Prophet"

#0076. The sky opens up and it spits forth its one and only Prophet. Other Prophets had been liars emboldened by the lust of followers and the power of cult. They spilled like serpents into the muddy bath. I would like to assume the mantle of it. In the depth of night, I feel the Tongues again inside my brain. That should be me spat out by the sky. He has no Tongues that I do not possess. I wanted for meaning so badly. I was going to fix it all. Instead I became this.

"Shadows"

#0077. The tomb has no warden. The prison has no gatekeeper. It is a place of honor system incarceration. But there are so many Shadows. When you try to leave their side, they stitch themselves right up to you. The whole of the secret place is just Shadow. You can try to speak to them but they cannot respond. You are taught to believe they are mimics. But Shadows travel to places untraceable. They survive in memories and consume the poor victim's intellect. Shadows leave the brain in place and semi-autonomous when they finally assume a human identity.

"The Breathing Specter"

#0078. I don't want to open my eyes. She is waiting for me. She is always there waiting for me. She exists between spaces. I can feel her breath on my face. There is a chill to it. She is a breathing specter. She wants me to look into her eyes but I refuse to open mine. I can feel her moving closer. She is always drawing closer. I won't open my eyes. That won't keep her at bay.

"I Try and I Try and I Try, But I Cannot Ignore It"

#0079. This thing writhes inside of me, jagged teeth out, green skin, foul and grotesque. Like some ancient worm plunging through my gut. I push back on it, but its jaw is powerful and the wounds it leaves behind are gaping holes. Could you imagine being so empty and hollow? I disassemble myself, piece by piece, looking for its horrid head. It burrows deep. I cannot excise it. I twist. It has fouled everything inside me.

"Better Left Unexamined, Better Left Untouched"

#0080. It is a formation. A solitary conglomeration of events. The focal point. You want to have some energy behind you. You want there to be a silvery light that shines in everything. You want to believe in a soul. You look deep inside yourself and find the chamber where it should reside. It is a formation, there. This concretion of your memory and your hope. You can pull it out. It shines with that silvery light you want. But it's so fragile. The pieces of it shed like the scales of butterfly wings. And you lose momentum as it dies in the open air.

"The Moment You Are Untethered Is The Moment You Are Free To Spiral Out"

#0081. Where she lodges in your heart you stay to be kept leashed like a dog and relegated to some dustbin memory of hers she keeps you tethered for herself but she lets go in warm weather and you fall through time and space so alone so isolated so alone it is your own fault she will whisper as you degrade and decompose in the wilds she wanted nothing to do with you but you were always so there so there and now she can be free and you will fall and fall and fall until your lips are gone and the last drop of you dissolves in the aether.

"Chrysalis"

#0082. You are pieced together again. And you will face the same devastation. One day you will be free of the malady. You know how you will attain your freedom. You have built plan after plan after plan. No jail can hold you. No tomb can seal you in. You are stitched together from dead things. From cold things. Each failure of the will frosts your breath. Put it all together again. You emerge from a makeshift chrysalis. You are reborn and ready to die again.

"Innocent"

#0083. My innocence is no secret. I am the startled pup. I am the wounded fawn. I am apart and separate in my naivete. The world laps at my soul. It degrades and demoralizes me. I never grew up. I never came of age. I am a mewling orphan. I am not fit to survive, here. I see the little things ground up and terrorized and I cannot stand up in its face. The Giant howls at the edge of space and it shakes me to my core. The adults are playing dress up. I want them to wither and melt away.

"Sonder"

#0084. Every window leads to a life distinct from your own. I try so hard to remain apart and aloof. Or I try so hard to not be so apart and aloof. I cannot remember what happens by will and what happens by accident. Am I alone by design? Every window has a life inside of it. Someone like me. Living a life like mine. Having hopes and fears like mine. They live parallel to me. We'll never touch. We'll never meet. I wonder how lonely they are? I do not think I would like them.

"Oh"

#0085. The secrets stack up and up and up. I stumble through the doors and the feeling of them takes my breath away. They steal breath. I pictured things like files or books. But secrets are living things. They wriggle and they spit venom. They are hideous. They carry with them a tremendous stench. They are vile things. The stack up and up and up. The place is overrun with them.

"What Even is This, What am I Seeing?"

#0086. My fondest wish is to just close my eyes and never open them again. Breathless. Still.

"Butterflies"

#0087. The trilling hits just at the thought of her. The stomach loops upon itself and he is weightless. She doesn't notice him floating. Maybe she does. The sweat beads up behind his skin. He careens heedlessly inward. There is anxiety in every little moment. Every strand of her hair. A stray eyelash. He is consuming himself. He melts with her every minor movement. He is lost inside of her.

"Greetings From the Moon"

#0088. Standing above it all. The Earth in tilt and spinning, pulling her world in orbit. She raises the Sea up. She lets it recede. There is such peacefulness here. The light of the universe is so clear. Blue and green fade to dull brown. She can watch the ants eat themselves. Here she is the Queen she was always meant to be. She sits on a throne of ancient mineral. The halo of stars is her crown.

"The Hollowed"

#0089. Little screaming from wherever you are. Those dying breaths still hollow out your bones. You could never believe in such fancy endings. You know about the worms. You know about the dust and the ash. Don't give it a coat of fresh lacquer. It is what all things are. It is wretched. It is polluted. Bear up that grim menace. Forget those rose covered books.

"Fools Believe the Things That Fools Cannot Help but Believe"

#0090. You shouldn't believe in anything, Alice will tell you. Even though she is the absolute thing to believe in. I met her in so many places. You would expect doves to descend. Sunbeams through rent clouds. Storms. Booming voices. Angels with fiery swords? Earthquakes. Devastation. Time standing still. But instead, it is this overwhelming and discomfiting calm. It is a calm so dense that it hurts. You are a fool, she will tell you. But there will be a sweetness to her voice. You are a fool because that is what she intends. You never had a choice in the matter.