The Mouth of Hell

"Abandon hope, all ye who enter here..."

My throat opens up into a cavernous tower keep, ascending into the shadow above. The spectral ghosts of condemned witches, or perhaps the ghastly, blood-thirsty revenants who became Dracula's brides, slowly descend the stone steps, diaphanous gowns wrapping their pale, delicate forms like spirit flowers tossed down the mouth of a well in the lower depths; carefully they descend, delicately, like angels; so as not to fall to one side, lest they plummet through the void and into the grinding mechanism of my teeth.

And forever and ever they still descend, and I understand now that my belly is death, and the churning bowls of my sulfurous gut are the fires of a Hell unquenchable.

And I brood below.

And I brood above.

But, try as I might, I am frozen beneath, in the shadowy cold, my legs disappearing into the black ice a hundred leagues deep.