Acheron
by John Xavier
Free ebook download: Acheron by John Xavier, legally licensed and available in PDF format.
A poetry collection combining the fantastic and surreal with social observation and political themes. 114 pages. Notable poems: Hexersy, Fruition, Wild Again, Ashtoreth's Labyrinth. Free download
A poetry collection combining the fantastic and surreal with social observation and political themes. 114 pages. Notable poems: Hexersy, Fruition, Wild Again, Ashtoreth's Labyrinth, Daughter of Terra, and others.
Sample Poem:
WILD AGAIN
The earth exploding under his hooves,
A crowd of people screaming –
The race just begun
A wave of horses, one avatar of thundering flesh,
Even as they furiously
Strove to shatter themselves into
Winners and losers –
Their nostrils shuddering as these
Are outpouring industrial torrents of steam;
They are carried on legs of violent brawn,
Hurtling forward
From sheer wrath and avarice
Astride every one too, a parasitic rider
His strikes him with the whip,
Demanding speed, demanding all his strength,
And so the animal
Leaves nothing for himself –
Everything he has is given to this
Unfathomable purpose
In the machinery of the race however
An ancestral hunger awakens,
A roar in the caverns of
His convulsing blood-gorged heart
He continues to run as the scenery sloughs away,
The jockeys disintegrating on their steeds
Golden prairies devour the racetrack
And the people shouting
Turn to skeletons, and then, to dust –
The unending plains of an uncivilized continent
Take their place under storm laden skies
He is not alone
All the horses are wild again,
Wild as the dawn
And a land barely risen from the seas –
They are creatures so wild they are as newly born
As trembling colts still covered in placenta,
Unsure and wild, breathing
Fresh air for the
First time
Somehow they’ve never known
The weight of a saddle, never startled
At a man’s shadow
Theirs' is a world untouched by human hands,
A place where their stampede
Is the only sound that can answer the
Dark towering clouds above –
These flash over them,
The sky splintering with crooked fire
Sprinting forms
Lit with fleeing illumination,
Huge tectonic muscles
Straining to injurious limits
And then the returning of the screaming
Phosphorescence awakens him
A wreath is being placed
Around his neck
As he wheels in the clashing photography
And carnivorous applause
Now victorious, heaving, enslaved
