Vision of a Mad King

I am Saul, beset, besieged, afraid to face the war Without the latent singing of my natal star Exposed. Fiends and witches medium know alone To bring up a spirit or read the scattered bone But those dark, heinous hags are no more With venom wrath I slaughtered and purged them And still find no praise in the silence of my core From him who first hated them ... no ah nor em. I am Saul, speak to your king, is any left To compose me, I now of old Samuel bereft Can find no spark of God or light abroad Endor is far, the trek is hard, trek is hard. One witch is there, you are sure? One for me To consult and consort and be forgiven One to tell aught of promise or pallid tragedy How stands my course between hell or heaven? At dead of night, the deadly still becalms the world And I am cloaked darkest rags and identity curled Catlike within, laden with ritual wage I venture forth To convent with awful hag, and make my fickle sport And then a hollow voice was heard, a distant chilling Echo, with edges icily dripping in the dark of my heart The witch of Endor like a foggy figure, rising and nearing The leaves and all things normal fled, or moved apart. Then out of the cavernous depths of earth I Saul saw, like entrails from a flimsy sow at birth The form, the icy apparition that soon became Exactly as the figure of he as Samuel named Looming me with frightening spite to the end The sword twisted, gut wrenched, headless time Mark how the judgment my soul have rend Mark me shivering in the alien, cold, callous clime. What thing is this, what dreadful horror to my eyes Seditious vampire, treason is the altar of reason's lies Yet nothing shakes me cold unless the force is real The apparition came and went and my fate was sealed. And I Saul, king, who heard the dead groaned before A thousand cruel ways upon a bloody floor, aghast Beheld what had no explanation in temple or shore Sin's perdition entangled me from a calamitous past.