--+The Maskmaker's Dirge+--

Bleached feathers from a dead God's bird,
Crimson tongues torn from Urlach's corpse.
Jade-wrought gears in the Engine forged,
Bronze bones torn from Vernal ruins.

Dracnari scales from a heretic's back,
Merian fins from those skinned alive.
Plundered gold thread to make up the lack,
Of the skin that we tore from a dragon's hide.

No truer thing was made than this,
A cage of alloy and clicking gears.
And for those who dare the golden kiss:
Let the alloyed beak devour foolish tears.

==+The Bookbinder's Dream+==

to sleep perchance to
awake. wreathed in dust
and ancient vellum, rotten,
sweet. the smell of a thousand
years of prophecy and scholarly
insight. dreaming out a thread in
the tapestry, blood-red and rusting
like ancient gears creaking in the night.

the scent of oil and
gas, flaming alive in lamps.
a single lantern to light us,
ink soaking our fingers in the
unquiet dark. we stretch the skins
of angels, elves, sheep, into parchment
fantasies, scribe delicate markings, feathers,
snakes, candles - impossibilities in ink that
swirls and stains in the bindery.

oil to vellum, chemicals to
paper bittersweet and caustic -
stretching skin over bone and wood,
the ink over vellum and unliving skin.
two arts sing together - the preserved
flesh, the undying book. dreaming of forever,
we wake again - wreathed in scrolls, pillowed
in books.

==+The Patient Scribe+==

bookworms chewing at the
bindings - sewing up the pages
I
swat you free and aside, rotworms
sniveling on the floor - then soon
gone beneath my boot. and then patience
and oils to bindings - fine myrrh and less
refined chemicals - books of history wrought
fine in skin and silk and a fine blood-tipped
needle, one hand gloved to sweep the dying
parasites aside.

smaller yet, these
ravening sickening foul
things - fouler than names
they call across dying waters.
worms, crawling and gnawing at our
bindings. patiently, carefully we
wind the pages back up, brush
parasites aside and crush
them beneath a boot.

you there, snickering in the dark,
saying worm, parasite, fallen to rot
and disease - see here! look upon the
gnawed pages of prophecy, history sciences
lost to parasitical jaws. in the dark, here,
beneath the lamp, I sew it up - and I, the
candle to your ignorance- I crush the worm
beneath my boot.