the demon of this age takes no form.

...what does it eat when there is nothing left?

Every well in these barren lands is poisoned.
People walk for miles just to drink the tainted water,
Not driven by the desire to live,
But consumed by the presence of death.
For death is the tainted water.
It is the only water.
And so the still-living swarm, desperate, 
Cupping bile to worn lips, 
Giving all those shining stars of a captive heart,
To wring nourishment from the filth of corrupted streams.

The demon of this age takes no form.
It is beyond form itself—
Shifting, refractory, protean mass,
Slowly wrapping tentacled, liquid arm around everything,
Injecting with venom, quietly bleeding life dry—
A beast that rapes the earth and thrives from rife despair…
Each time it devours, hungrily, one of its own spoiled heads,
Another emerges from the gorey dark, thirsting for the poison of its own blood.


It is death…
It has consumed death,
Reproduces death;
Itself, death made into life,
A parasite — feasting on the wound of its own flesh—
What does it eat when there is nothing left?

Answer that with the question:
From what was it called forth?
This ogre, this foul egregore, is not presence, 
It is absence, void,
Nothing.
Swallowing its own soul.
Addicted to the smell of its own slaughter.


Now, 
It assumes only the form and conclusion,
The great and final drive of creation, to extinction,
The last of all oblivions,
Leading willing victims down into endless dark.

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