I washed up in Trinity, my pulse as slow as sand.
Corrupted by the venom of the serpent’s poison gland.
The town was stripped of all but bones.
The houses leaned obscenely.
Down the road a coyote loped, its milky eye fixed on me.
I saw a woman, dead and gray, skin peeled from her cold face.
Her eyes were eaten by the birds, black sockets stared out into space.
To her left there sat a man as vacant as the town.
The sun had boiled his spongy brains; a broken window for his crown.
This is because that is.
I clawed my way up to the pair, demanding what I sought.
He turned upon me sun-bleached eyes that promised respite could be bought.
I gave him everything I owned and all I’d worked to steal
To purge the toxin from my veins and have my body healed.
He took the bottle from the corpse and handed it to me.
Map-like veins and swollen clouds were all that I could see.
I drank that rank elixir in one gagging, wretched gulp.
It congealed inside my sickly frame, turning bile to pulp.
This is because that is.
I realized I’d been deceived by empty lies and promises.
His entire legend built on lies; through fools he came to prominence.
My journey a fool’s errand, so I shot him through his eye.
I shook his brains out from his head and hung his body on a pine.
This is not because that is not.
I set fire to all around me as I staggered out of town.
The coyote ran through fire and smoke, low upon the ground.
A ring upon the woman’s finger lit up like the sun.
As the coyote swallowed up her hand, Ragnarök was won.
This is not because that is not.
Hopeless, crazed, and dispossessed, I walked out in the desert.
My eyes swam in the heavens while my feet slept in the dirt.
With no food, no water and no cure, I prayed for death to find me.
The sun spun round and swelled; I was sure that it would blind me.
This is not because that is not.
I felt my flesh fall off its bones, my soul evaporate.
My self turned into something else; supernal change of state.
That foul star absorbed my being until we became as one,
Lifted into fetid skies, shedding my old form.
This ceases to be because that ceases to be.