THE LAND OF ZILCH

 

Oh yes, a mythical place as gray as it sounds

where velvet shoals abound and the melancholy

are found waking in their creepy misty grottoes.

No one thinks to come here on purpose, yet

here they end up just before they let it go.

This is a thrift world, a browser’s reality,

where demonic natives fight over your clothes.

Life hangs upside down by its death grip

till all is lost and you slip through brambles

and slide down thorny hillsides into the abyss.

Welcome to a last chance land where Satan

dashed to earth to form a cave on his way to hell.

 

Fear, no worse than death when it tells you,

sickens you like the sound of battle trumpets,

takes your breath when your ledge gives way.

In final desperate haunts you hide from light

as you feel the earth’s jitters and birth pangs

where the stink of sulphur and brim rise up

and your seat of remorse is starved of oxygen.

Here’s a glimmer outpost hidden from the sky,

penultimate pit stop for the wicked and vile,

one more chance to smooth a kink in the brain

or regain a hope for that former world above,

a life on trial still clinging to the edge of doom.

 

Like a microbe trapped on the rim of existence

you crawl through fear and hurt toward death,

relieved when it comes as your sigh of anguish

echoes up the cavern walls as a warning to all.

Countless ironies slip through the filtered gloom,

meet unseen forces in the air, hang by a branch,

go the whole way down to land on a thermal,

saved by a billow, caught in the apron of fate.

If you stay the course and listen to your faith

a way up may yet be found, for the down and out

the climb is a greater struggle than the plunge,

a return to life is a weirdness hard to overcome.

 

Zilch is one place that never takes you back,

or welcomes you, it only spies your raw materials

and looks for tiny cracks in your amour plating.

This dreamlike habitat where nightmares feed

will teach the heartbreak drama of the gorge,

a whispered vulgate of the shamed and depraved.

Survive this fall and climb back up from here

and life will seem much stranger than ever before,

your light still far from grace, your soul in doubt 

with a desert thirst, a taste for the press of flesh,

the hunger that can't be satisfied by any love

save one that reaches out in desperate need.

 

Oh yes, a maniacal place as gray as it sounds

where trolls abound and the cruel melancholy

are found sharpening knives along misty fells.

No one ever plans on coming here for real, yet

here they end up just before the darkness falls.

This is a very different world, a shameful duality,

where desolate beings wrestle for your clothes.

Life hangs upside down by a terrible toehold

just before the lost ones slip through brambles,

slide down dells and thorny hills to the abyss.

Welcome to Zilch, the final place where Satan

reached out, tearing this cave on his way to hell.


 

©Jimmy Warner Design, 2011