Ten thousand ships will sail

Ten thousand ships will sail the ocean of fire
ten thousand monsters will flee to the mountains,
crawl out of the lagoon and wipe the goo from their skin.
The deer-headed snake will watch from behind a tree.

When the goo is wiped clean from the monsters' skin
the monsters will take up in the mountains
camp out in the clean air and drink from the saltless well.
They will celebrate for seven thousand years, building fires, drinking wine.

Strange music will play from stranger beasts.
The ten thousand monsters will celebrate for seven thousand years
mad in copulation and wild in lust, raving ceremonies, orgies.
The deer-headed snake will watch from behind a tree.

The ten thousand ships will be lost in the ocean of fire.
Few will survive and return to the homeland.
7 thousand will perish in the raging fires, the bloody ocean,
screaming their mother's names from their mouths.

Return to the womb, the survivers will come back saying.
Grab the bloody cord and climb back in. The world is dying.
The sea is hardening and the earth is loosening. The ropes are fraying.
The stilts that once held the universe in place are woobling, falling.

The planets are falling millions of miles down the well of the tomb.
True death will soon resurface, after a prolonged period of hibernation.
This hibernation is ending, the one true death will soon remove its mask,
open her eyes, stretch her limbs and yawn, inhaling the seven trillion suns.

The monsters are held captive in the mountains by the elements,
stuck in the timeless warfare of living. Some time passes, the celebrations carry on.
Ten thousand monsters ravenous in orgy soon turns to twenty thousand,
Two hundred and twenty thousand monsters emerge after some time in the mountains.

The wine is sweet, the ground soft. But the crowds are growing large,
the food is running scarce. The lambs have mostly been slaughtered,
the monsters begin living off of the meat of their own dead. From every death
a new life must spring, another tragedy must play out on the stage.

The deer-headed snake lays low in the brush, working at night surveying and building.
The monsters catch only a glimpse, a fleeting shadow, a lost breath.
He hides well, in the grass and the rock. His skin is the color of life. He blends.
His odor is foul, and the myths of the monsters run deep with odor.

Generations are lost, some time passes. The deer-headed snake is almost ready.
The myths of the monsters are hazy for the eyes, but alive for the nose.
A smell is always introduced in the prologue. The smell moves and shakes,
continues, grows old and dies and is reborn as some other smell, in the distance.

Population grows with the myths of the monsters. Too many, the sages say.
We cannot live with this many monsters on our warm island, they contend.
Something must be done. A plan is necessary to save the monsters in the mountains.
The sages meet and consult for one year, and in the end of one year a shaman speaks.

Under toxic cloaks the shaman dreams the solution. He dreams of the fairy land
where the grass parts to show a purple pond where tiny creatures with wings fly and drink.
They live in the trees surrounding the purple pond, they construct homes in the wood.
At night they fly under the yellow moon. The pond glows a luminescent purple.

The shaman dreams the ritual. He sees it clearly in his dreams, until his dreams are real.
The ritual of the tiny fairies is death by procreation, an ancient ritual, complex and intense.
The man lies with his head in a burning bed of coals. Concubines are hired for stimulation,
procreation. 7 concubines stimulate the man, one straddles him as his head burns.

The moment of death is the moment of life.
One soul climbs into the next.
He is dead and born.
Population is constant.