Acéphale from MMXXIII by The Cult of Grinning Martyrs

In the end,
he bowed with the headless—
the culmination of a fate
generations in the making.

The conspiracy was sacred,
and so too the sacrifice:
progeny doomed
by their progenitors,
a tongue clicking from behind.

At what point is a child
just a man?
Does it lessen the pain of death
if that threshold has been crossed?

Did she even realize
the nature of her wager:
that her children would outlive her
and spare her the weight of their
inevitable deaths?

And what of her mother?
Did she spare her offspring a thought
as she prepared the conditions of their destiny?

No matter her wishes,
no matter her intentions,
decapitation forced the truth upon her
and all paid the price for that
foundational sin of procreation:
engulfed in flame;
sawed through with piano wire.

In the end,
he bowed with the headless
as a husk and a puppet:
His ultimate inheritance
at the end of his line.

“Hope is my enemy. She is a succubus who descends upon sleeping humankind, whispering that there is a future. A bright future, as a matter of fact; as long as we persevere in extending our essences through our children. She is a liar, a snakeoil salesman bartering chimera for generative fluid, which she sucks out of us before casting our withered husks onto the fire. And so we fall, row upon row like seasons of corn, but not until we relinquish our seed into her exploitative hands. For in the end, we all die, and only Hope lives on.”

• Black Metal
• Metal
• Pessimism
• Progressive Black Metal
• Technical Black Metal
• United States