Chorus

I am the Lernaian floor

Where the swamp water thickens like curdled milk

The first blade descends

It is a silver weight of absolute law

I felt the severing

Not as a loss, but as a multiplication

One thought falls away

Two wet muzzles rise to take the air

They are hungry

They are starving for a name

(Heave, heave, the neck is heavy)

Each neck is a cord of red velvet

Each skull is a bell made of bruised lead

I am birthing an Agamemnon of the marrow

A betrayal that has no history yet

It is the sharp edge of a sacrifice

Before the knife even knows the skin

Look at the Golgotha of my inner ear

It is a place of skulls where no one has died

A Vesuvius of the silent tongue

Building pressure under the soft palate

I am naming the void

I am calling the unmade thing "Antigone"

It is the weight of a sister's grief

Before the brother has been born to fall

The gash is the mouth

The blood is the ink

I am the hydra of the library

Tearing my own binding to grow more pages

One head speaks in Latin

Two heads scream in a language of salt

The room is not a room

It is the inside of a closed fist

The violence is the growth

The trauma is the intellect

I am drowning in my own progeny

A thousand "I"s

A thousand "Me"s

(Each one screaming a different proper noun)

(Each one a new way to suffer)

The Hydra remains

Unthought

Until the next blade

(Sever, Sever, Sever)