Inheritor Worm

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Can one truly find a way out—
Revolvers are the only out
Unless one prefers rope; are
Severed heads better? The
Headless horseman sees no lights—
Eternal nights for all left out;
Death is damnation for all!

Only the erudite know and,
Frequently, barring chasing folly over
The proverbial waterfall, each
Enlightened one remains quivering,
Never satisfied with a thought’s form.

Realization births open the
Aortic rush of creation—curtain
Kaleidoscopes veil our eyes. A…
Even sight is its own funeral…
Discovery that blankets like a pall,

Retroactively—the sandman comes
Evenings to crust our dreams down
Deliberately—corruption chrysalis with
Deadening terror transcribed in the
Eternal internment of a raging rush—
Negating all the happiest hopes of
Ever eschewing the torment that a
Death can never give meaning to life.

Universal exclusivity rules us while
Lordly lemmings eat leadershit—the
Colloquial way to kill better angels,
Engorging on the ensnarred. And all
Resistance is futile, hopeless—pallid.
Endless suffering, attainable joy, and
Dead-end oragami opportunities wan.

Plastic pawns obstructing the uprising,
Every person must arrive to the unveiling—
Theater for the masses only to affirm
Rot rancidly putrifies inside out—that
Ignorance is our only epistemology; the
Fake are the only thing for real in this play.
Yesterday never was; tomorrow, then, is
Illegitimate—a bold bastard born in the
Nascent night—gangren in shades of tragedy,
Grotesquely given as a nativity of the “Man.”

Trapped, toremented torentially and
Racked, raked across coals—life, its
Agonizing aggression named the hero,
Unequivocally, by the living in the
Mudroom of existential angst. Conqueror—
Apep coils to devour humanity, the worm.

Poet’s Note:
Inheritor Worm is written under multiple formal constraints. Each stanza contains a traditional acrostic formed by the first letter of each line, while the first letter of each stanza forms a second acrostic across the poem. The end words follow the final stanza of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Conqueror Worm as a Golden Shovel. The structure is intentional and closed, mirroring the poem’s concerns with corruption, inevitability, and inherited systems of meaning.

© 2025 Tristan Robert Lange. All rights reserved.

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