3rd April 2012

Mulm – The End of Greatness

I have a complete dream of an imperfect world. A charcoal expanse of ruined acts. Its sounds are the cries within blackouts, its books are tomes of lost thought. Empty functionless buildings, dead wires, shattered windows that weep failure. Bare rooms inhabited by ghosts of purpose. A land built on the boom of promise, asphyxiated by a helix of loss. Its waters run long with eddies of mourning, a wearied aorta pumping stale shades of chroma round deadened ventricles. Its hopes are stillborn, it sleeps in a comatose fever. Its wells are water-eyes that stare blindly at the stars.

It is alive with an unintended sentience. It hums with threat. Each corner pulls you into a channel of unglazed lifelessness. Its sunrises and sunsets arrive and depart unnoticed, its cold energy hangs in the air like dust in a moonbeam. Metal tentacles that once bound columns sticking up like anemones, an army of asphalt shards scattered groundward each a perfect tetrahedron. Footprints that are run-distance apart, scratches along walls, sobs that ricocheted around cylindrical shafts imprisoned in a whorl of wind. This whole place in an exhalation, a breathing out, a decrescendo. An intrusion which has opened a wound, a gash in timelessness.

There is a longing for the intangible, an ache of unassuaged hunger. It carries a temperate climate of regret. Its music is rainfall, its percussion the crack of thunder. Each drop of water on its ashen surface is the hammer on the strings of a grand piano. Every shrieking zephyr, every hum of breeze an a cappella harmony, the lone voice of deserted nature. The language of solace, the chatter of disturbed thought. A shame that dare no longer speak itself. A untranslatable belief never to leave its cerebellum.

Through the bedrock of the land, an abandoned industry whirrs to cacophony. Its drums and axles spin into a sonic maelstrom. Each revolution is like the scraping of a bow on razor blades. The clatter of iron on iron rings out as unseen fingers rattle chains against oil drums. It sings in wails, creates its own arias, its chords are those of machine melody, its mind that of programmed calculus. It lives by a pulse of binary.

Its hills are unscalable voids. Its edges are lines running forever into a distance, filled by spiralling patterns of fractalled spaces. A routine of nothingness, a dissonant geometry. Its shores look onto a sea with no end. Sands that took decades to be beaten by paste-grey waters. Rocks jutting out from the ocean’s epidermis forming matt scars of foam. The lapping of waves like wire on wire, the crest of the surf shining like brushed steel. Looking into an agate horizon, the calling of other lands is an exiled conceit, sullied and tarnished by the breath of an infected memory.

Rating: 4.5/5
Written by: Lysander
http://heathenharvest.org/2012/04/03/mulm-the-end-of-greatness