Chapter 1 – The Wall of the Labyrinth

      1. Touch the wall worn smooth by other seekers and truly know your task is fruitless.
      2. You are here to recover yourself, but there is nothing like that here for such as you; your cowardice has already defined you. Into this place you wish to spring yourself wholesale, without a tale to tell about yourself.
      3. This wall will tell you different for a while. You will take the coward’s track into poetry, and be expelled. It is your fate. Are you not eager?
      4. Sing and hiss your song into these smooth stone walls, a thousand thousand thousand seekers have hollowed out these steps and floors. Paper will bloom like flowers on these walls and die back into dirt. You have left the leaves of grass for a good chalk walkway and a kerb of stone. You are in the same place as your ancestors, even if everything has changed.
      5. Whatever story you invent here will not last. A life is nothing, unexamined, and less than nothing, untold. Perhaps your clothing has a slogan. Did you choose it to read poetry in? Recollect that without stratified context, none of this means anything to anyone but you.
      6. Sometimes the story is clear and through lines are laid down by gardeners in Heaven but this is the Dark Book and there is no such ending.
      7. It is a crash site, urban warfare, civil unrest and badly located traffic lights. The algorithm’s glue of life and story, coil’d in protein and performances, comes apart and changes phase in the labyrinth. The old things don’t compute.
      8. MOLOCH is angry. His is the voice you hear over the guide. Even when the guide is yelling at you MOLOCH is louder, but to listen and truly hear is to acknowledge him, and the truth of him will not set you free.
      9. Think how many MOLOCH will liberate from this infamous life. It is not always blood and fire MOLOCH sends from the sky. Some shall starve and some shall self-slaughter. MOLOCH’s liberty is always death.
      10. DARK BOOK read me through this apocalypse.
      11. It is a cleansing and a scraping. This palimpsest will lose the human story entire. Place your senses against the labyrinth wall and move.
      12. In this version of hell, the placard flops up from below as if given a shove from a tentacle. Like most signs it’s designed to be useful after you need it. “You abandoned Hope, and look what it got you. MOLOCH knows your grievous errors, and MOLOCH knows your brutal lusts, and MOLOCH creates nothing but a plain of scavengers. MOLOCH will kill what good is in you until you can kill the good in other people and feel nothing.”