The Substack of Valerie Lynn Stephens
The Substack Podcast of Valerie Lynn Stephens
Lacrima Mortis: A Work of Experimental Literature (Part 25)
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Lacrima Mortis: A Work of Experimental Literature (Part 25)

Someone’s alarm screams out a warning, but it is too late. I am reluctantly stolen from my slumber,

body heavy from the weight of sleep’s absence,

mind brooding, groggy and sullen,

as I am hurled back onto the barren,

unmerciful landscape of a world

that insidiously creeps and seeps

into the thickened skin and its many hidden crevices, an all-too-deluminating light

of encumbrant necessity and sense-ability.

And who is the keeper of this house?

Neither Mother, Lover, Father, Sister, Brother

or Friend, nor any of our kin,

but the Brother of Sleep,

so avariciously omnipresent as we weigh

the costs of survival,

while Life itself extorts without us.

And so the work is neglected,

and we see that there is no way

to stop the accounting

without soon running out of red ink,

to remind us of our debts.

Yet the overseer has still kept us intact,

and we are at least assured that as long

as there is blood running hot and fast

beneath our skin,

the books will remain in balance,

and we will remain ever fatally noble

and upright in our figurings,

until the costs of survival

reach their final recompense

in Death.

Until that celestial overseer of all

decides he can live in indigence with us no longer,

and he sends the Brother of Sleep to keep us,

the mortal enemy and forbidden lover

of the Life we had so carelessly spent,

trying to merely preserve.

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