Life Encapsulated

The third page is mostly a mass of indecipherable scribbles, with such occasional words or phrases between smears of bat guano as, "MUST HAVE RHYTHM!" or, "Death, destruction... It's all going wrong!" visible in the margins. Towards the bottom of the page, this is squeezed in, with a few crossings-out at the beginning, but with elegance and confidence of writing towards the conclusion:

The world is dazzling. Light shines
On ugliness, depravity, disease.
Pain, struggle, waste; Time
Itself a blight. All things shackled.

Freedom: the dance of death.
Savage and joyful, the duck
And slash; the rasp of breath,
The mastery of skill and luck.

The blood, the murderous red
Haze. Blade gliding, blade sweet,
Through flesh and bone. Life ended;
Soul departed. From body to meat.

Light blurs, the world fades. And
Music arises: emotion pure,
Haunting strains, soft and sweet.
Sorrowful and rejoicing.

Perfect, beautiful, majestic,
The Herald shows the way.
To bitter release.


From The Collected Writings of Izrick.