The Equinox (Volume I, Number III)

THE THREE WORMS “Much have I looked upon—I, the now crawling, damp and sightless evidence of her sight. “Tam her eyes. “Empires shone in me: suns set, moons arose, and were drowned like lovely naiads in the waters of the sky. I knew wild flowers so beautiful, that one dared not touch them lest their beauty start to mere ugly life. “T am that quiver of fragile and delicious expectation that shone in the virgin eyes of her when .. . O happy hour! “Tam that greediness, that terrible woman’s greediness, fierce as drought, relentless as Death, which devours its own portion in the feast of life. “ And I too, like her mouth, witness to it that she was evil. The senses are the person in so much as they are the sweet janitors to all that come and go. Through our five portals life only flows, and the flavour of its tides is with us always. I sit in judgment on myself—I where the world could gather itself in one, little, humble, focus-point of curiosity and peep into the garden of her soul—I—where seas could be held calm and captive in a little pool of blue—I—who could consume mountains in a flash, and devour the dawn, I who could bid the moon trail her white limbs for my pleasure through the windy bagnios of the sky. “T sit in judgment and condemn, for often I was a sword when Truth was a: little child, and the breasts of my beauty I gave to Worthlessness in the stinking lupanars of Treachery and Deceit. “Brothers, like the afterlight of day, I the light of her life consort with the shadows of evening, and I say it softly, 321