Animated cavorters of debauchery
emerge from the peripheries, cartwheeling
manifest excesses of the great demonic five –
envy, greed, lust, wrath, pride –
enabled as ever by the little serpents

But the forecast of violent orgies goes awry,
for nurtured evils pale beside man’s base nature lain dormant
by necessity until these end days
though Moloch and Baal may rile spirits in true bodily possessions,
they cannot compare to what lurks deeper in the bones

Heretofore latent indolence
latent as only indolence could be
gelatinous sloth and gluttonous fear
congealing, amorphous
a safe spineless sludge state
licensed by our self-made tools

Perhaps a fiery demons’ hell is preferable to such a return
into man’s own primordial Chthonic underworld