This is adaptation.
The purpose of this poem is to emulate a sense of another author style but warping it to your own voice. A lot of DeCroo’s poetry is about seeing the darkness as beauty. I took something like the end and personified that as a journey. Written for a poetry class in 2021.
Eschatology
A small fire in the marrow
of your bones, consuming you from the inside out…
throat torn (from the scream buried in the carpet) shards
of powdered glass…the moment in a coal mine
before (a swarm of beaks and feathers) explodes.
-Lines from “The Cost of Leaving or the Song of Suicide” by Rodney DeCroo
The world is cold again in Tartarus, an acrid stench of once friendly faces.
Too soon will you need to plaster the walls of your skin with steel and rubber.
People unmasked to show their true face, the slobbering and tainted maw
Of expectations; now removed from the clay forced to be naked.
A gathering storm of form-fitting ash readying to mimic the goddess Dike,
Wielding images of my crimes—the bodies captured frozen in time
as they meld together.
As you scar yourself, slicing and shaping
until less of you remains and more of their values inflate you.
Burrowing into your mind is the maggot of envy,
Devouring the ambrosia that keeps your plaster in place and the scars hidden.
Lull yourself into comfort and drink deeply from the stream of Lethe,
And sleep, for when the alarm breaks and your heart beats back into rhythm,
dragged back through the River Styx, and you will be gone
And so too will the dreams.