Atop the Heights

For Anna

Atop the icy cold heights
I stood at the precipice.
A demon-angel with wings burnt,
bereft of heavenly grace.
I stood watching the world below,
and peered at the firmament above me.
At that moment I was a being
that belonged to neither Realm.
A contradiction in both substance and thought.
The freezing winds cut my immortal flesh,
a reminder of my damnation:
to feel for eternity.
The darkness that I kept for company
had come to speak back to me.
The devil I was could not compare
to the terrors in my blackened soul.
But there I stood, over all the earth,
Prince of my own life,
Maker of my of own path.
And though I was a fiend—
to Man and to God—
I was free, liberated, uncaged.
The secrets I knew kindled a force in me;
the Fire of God that I stole raged wildly in me.
I was not man nor divine being nor nothingness.
And yet I was all these, there atop the heights.
The Wanderer, the Bringer of Light;
the thing with pale visage with a burning within himself.
The Chaos that came at the Beginning was inside me;
I was made of its entropic nature.
No, I was neither of the world nor of Heaven, or even of Hell.
I was solitude itself; I was that which is beyond.
I could claim relation to no kith or kin,
nor could I any longer map the lineage I descended from.
Not then, not at that time, there at the crest of existence.
I no longer belonged to God—my exile was eternity itself.
I could not become as Man, who I so admired.
I felt more than they but could not endure pain as they do.
I was more than what can be described.
I was a mote in the Universe, and yet I exceeded it.
By my blasphemous Fall I became so much more
than what even God had intended.
Evil, the name I was scarred with, could not represent my true spirit.
How could it when it was of the dogma
commanded down from Heaven in ire?
No, I knew there and then that dogma was a poison:
Sin, Evil, Hatred, Perfidy, Malevolence:
each the same dogmatic poison with a different name.
All this I understood, perched upon the highest of mounts.
And when these revelations dawned and settled in me,
I met the Sun, the greatest of creations, rising over the horizon.
I embraced its fire, that birthed the earth
and would be its eventual doom.
And, free at last, I closed my eyes for a moment;
reopening them I breathed in one last inflamed breath
through my dragon-maw;
and then spread my wings and took flight;
towards the Sun,
towards the First and Last Light,
towards the Beginning and the End.

M.M. — 04-Aug-2015