Apocalypse Skull-God: The War by Yucheng Tao
I see everyone falling beneath the iron flowers,
like monstrous carnivorous plants
shedding poisonous gas across the vast night.
Humans drink bitter wine from their own veins,
collapsing into the perfume of darkness, rotting slowly away.
II
The Skull-God rises from the mad ambition of the greedy,
where serpents from laboratories fuse with alchemy
to birth the skeletal deity.
He commands the latest technologies,
breeding mechanical beasts
that tear apart the fragile dawning light.
I long to gather armies, to summon the people
of our star to aid humankind,
seeking the final Ark hidden beneath Nevada’s desert,
buried in bunkers.
But the flowers of war loom,
the apocalypse arrives,
men are exposed and crawl upon the dust.
III
On our Green-Plant Star,
under the umbrella of endless vines,
we sleep in peace.
The crashing, tumbling oceans of Earth
stir our compassion, and we find the will
to halt the Skull-God’s punishment upon men.
We seek the key behind the Sphinx,
a secret like the mirrored reflections of moon and sun,
a twin-born mystery.
IV
On a night of roaring thunder,
the poisonous flowers and hounds
of the Skull-God chase us down.
But among Earth's people,
they forge walls of human shields,
burning themselves into ashes.
Not even shrouds remain to cover them.
That is their fate.
In my homeland, I had never seen
such brutal darkness —
as if the bloodstained jaws of ancient lion kings,
opened wide before me. In my ears,
the symphony of destruction blares.
Yet still, we search, holding the key to peace, as
the dove of peace flies before my eyes,
toward the luminous road of the future.