[Suzerain of Sheol]

Acedia

Deliverance:
1. The mercy-killing of a species through suicide-by-apathy
(If only.)

Churning through saviors like generations
oblivious in nature, moving past the murders
smiling into the sun
and this marriage to mutilation
buying atrocity on the cheap
drowning the devil in anodyne
while the spirit of the kind annihilates peace

Break them on the rack.

End them on the cross.

An acrimonious sacrifice
to momentary gods
twisting the abyss
wounding the universe
signing a death sentence with a mother's kiss

Someone else will bury them.

Dying like starlets, heroin chic
aborting the conscience perpetually
the embrace of damnation in lovable genes
reaping a soul into being

Like all the rest.

Benevolence and nurture
a corpse cradling a still-birth
the vanitas vindication
of a natalist's validation
preposterously naming the stars
as they crush you

[Quiet Man Cometh]

I like this part here:

"twisting the abyss
wounding the universe
signing a death sentence with a mother's kiss

Someone else will bury them."

I like the little solo lines you've been adding lately, and can't help but note that parentheses seems to be replacing your ellipses. ;)

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Oh get out of here, this poem is terrible and that's the worst part! :P

But no seriously, this poem is my worst in a while.

[Quiet Man Cometh]

well maybe that "mother's kiss" part I'm not sure about, but I do like internal rhyming and such.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

It's all tripe. Hate it hate it hate it. Though I guess the rhyming came out all right.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Agathós Daímōn

It wasn't the day we killed the last philosopher-king
as the idiots gang-raped wisdom in the streets
cheering for the razing of their civilization

It wasn't when we accepted our lot as sellout assassins
executing the future for anyone who'd pay
a bullet to the biosphere for food on the plate

And it wasn't the sunrise presaging extermination
merely an empty threat full of hot air
as we dragged it down to star in our snuff-fuck of the planet

No

This wasn't any of those things

This was the death of history

And I can't remember how long ago we started to envy the dead

They burned the forests first and then everything else
the space required to erect their idols
Thanatos and Demogorgon
Mammon and Angra Mainyu
all hauled in bitterness from the sludge of the abyss
in the evaporated beds of Styx and Lethe
ashamed of the association
but slavery was more vogue than sex
so we found a new use for the old gods
in the churches of science laid to irradiant waste
and no one knows how to make more nukes

But that's not even the half of it

The ones who remained pretenders to the sapience of virtue
as if it had ever meant anything at all
those salient pariahs drunk on memes of lèse-majesté
careening into the ether as they plummeted to the gutter
cursing in languages no one understood
our martyrs of an unspectacular suicide
missed by none

It was not long before we forgot what heroes were

Every mind the victim of its own chimera

Fear could be one's joie de vivre

We were a people of poison
inimical matter down to our particles
stacking fake atoms together on the cosmic floor
and now the sieve of the earth shall cast us off
the human experiment rendered as a collapsing function
zeroing out
the great filter
the soul

I might lay myself down on the empty shore
and allow the waves to take me
cast off to the glowing waters
where mutant light would deliver me from the torture of this witness
the annihilation of a conscience as the last stand of truth

We could have been angels and we chose to be animals
dividing happiness among the billions until there was no other choice
the amniotic blood of the next population driving the engine of extinction
when those responsible have died and we suffer for their sins
abandoned to the cosmos as fetal innocents
left with no lives to regret

If only laughter could carry to the desolation of the stars
the testimony of this deranged species serving as a warning to the universe
as though there were some sense of order to it all
but there is only this ugly divorce from the earth
the unbreathable wind that we created
the legacy of humankind expelled to the void

and the hope that we never come back

[Quiet Man Cometh]

Is there something in the title I'm missing? Google finds "Agathodaemon" but I'm not sure if that's what you are referring to, here.

As usual, you have that wonderful, blunt, face-punch line at the end. :)

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Yes, that is the same term.

That line almost feels like a caricature of my usual tendency, not sure I'm sold on it. But, I am rather happy with the last three stanzas before it.

[Quiet Man Cometh]

I think the last line works quite well, but I fond of that trait.

I'm not sure I'm following the old god's details you have going in the middle of the poem. Sort of like they are unwilling participants in humanity's construction of something... not really sure. A divine authority to play... master?

[Suzerain of Sheol]

The opposite, actually. As though these incarnations of evil could not conceive and would want no part of the disastrous disgrace being described in the poem, thus making it something uniquely human and uniquely horrible.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Platonic Hate

Behold the uproarious and loathsome concert of self-carnage
the cosmic permutation of constituent complexity
Sysiphus snapping his spine
to be crushed at last like the dream of Asphodel
or Azrael burning like Icarus on Judgment Day
a disappointment to us all
but the autoabusive human will prevails
where gods might see the better wisdom of defeat
rancidly populating the earth
as though to smother the urge toward psychocide
a renaissance atrocity
high on those precious hormones
as the stars die like drug-slaved dancers
a masked ball for the conspiracy of healthy minds
the first solution
to spread agony like manufactured cheer
anointing the needlessly born
that enamoring and solipsistic mind-crime
of seizing a foetus from the nest of Orcus
the hammering rape of its soul until it admits to being real

And they call it a sin to murder yourself

[Quiet Man Cometh]

Okay so I read that as "Syphilis" at first, yet I still had the image of the guy and his rock. Good line, though.

I'm sitting here wondering what constitutes a "solipsistic mind game." Unless, that is the totality of conscious thought and the life that we think we lead through it.

I'm rolling those last few lines around in my head, trying to get an image of the fetus and what's happening to it, metaphorically speaking. I think I have a very good idea of what's actually going on in a literal fashion. Ew.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

*ahem*

That enamoring and solipsistic mind-crime

And as for the last line, considering I don't believe in the existence of the soul... take that as you will. :/

[Quiet Man Cometh]

Originally Posted by Suzerain of Sheol

*ahem*



And as for the last line, considering I don't believe in the existence of the soul... take that as you will. :/

Well...I guess in some ways the statement remains the same.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Well, "mind-crime" is a term coined by Nick Bostrom in his book, Superintelligence, as one of the "malignant failure modes" an AI can develop; in this case, it represents the simulation of immoral or unethical behavior in the 'mind' of the AI, such that it is indistinguishable experientially from the actual committing of the act.

It can also describe the actions of humans performed on non-sentient but in every other regard, human-seeming machines/robots. I.e. if you have a torture orgy with your robots, just because they can't experience what you're doing to them, the act for you is completely unable to be parsed from reality (assuming total simulation of human reaction from this brain-dead machine.)

That then gets into the concept of Philosophy Zombies, an old thought experiment to outline solipsism, i.e. 'What if I am the only conscious mind and everyone else merely acts as though they were, but has no internal awareness?'

So, I would hope that gives some insight into that choice of phrase? :P

[Quiet Man Cometh]

I'm going to have to go back and read the poem again when I'm more awake, but I think I've got "mind-crime" down.