I am left with an effigy of electricity,
an image graven in abstract,
too fluid for the fetters of a still-life,
too hollow to remain a moment in motion.
I am left with a confluence of humors,
too real to stand the strain of time,
soon to be diluted by the memorial solvent,
replaced by simulacrum, pretending emotion
as another glass gem of the past.

I am supplicant to the cruelest of mercies,
enthralled by the wonder of bereavement,
mystified by tears,
wearing wounds like splendor,
bleeding water and dust, finding fine company,
as I stroll through dying nurtures,
studying the marvels of decay.

I am burdened with a beating heart,
weighed down with sympathy,
abandoned by fire,
clutching tight to handfuls of ashes, begging for life,
as I stand beneath a sun-filled sky,
contrasting exile and salvation.

I am enamored of sensual murder,
infatuated by the romance of death,
sworn to love,
haunted by the reverie of wings, disconsolate and proud,
molting to a new persona
for the necromancy of compassion.

I am given to the grief of solace,
deluded by the specter of faith,
lost to despair,
sleeping easier in twilight hours, comfortably cold,
blessed with unremarkable dreams
and an abyss to inherit.

I stood and watched Megiddo go to seed,
yet still I found the world unworthy of the taste of light.
And following no star as the night loomed empty,
I wandered in ruins, wondering at the fantasies of dust.

I stood amid the rainfall on the Dies Irae,
bleeding steam as Heaven's water lashed my wounds.
And with no murmured prayer for all that would be lost,
I closed my eyes to deny the day its witness.

I stood and marveled in the avenues of Eden,
recalling awe in the silence of a sigh.
And for no purpose than my own succession,
I knelt and searched the earth for a surviving blade of grass.

I stood alone with the Chiliasm's dusk,
finding no friend in the nomad wind.
And uncaring for the cost, for things I had cherished,
I breathed deep of the new creation's ivory air.

I stood and studied the horizons of Gehenna,
hoping for the company of saints.
And looking north, I saw two trees,
with branches gnarled like lovers' hands.

And between them,
like the cords of an angel's harp,
were hung all the children of God.

I am among dear friends – the gasping stones, the faceless effigies of martyrs made faithless in their vigil. Time is relative, and I'm predisposed to see the remnants: hollow hopes transitioning to dreamless dust, blessed sentiment eroded to the blankness of slate. Surrounded by bodies, I am alive and alone, a face for the legion, conversing with the moon.

I grant you this gift.
I answer your pain.
My fingers,
spiders for your sake.
Your throat,
my door, my dear, soft prey.

No more crying.
No prayers to spurn.
I'm here for you.
Here to help.

I heard you calling.
I'll carry your guilt.
Your siren voice,
my widow muse.
My will, your wish,
our iron hands in folded bliss.

An end to your sorrow.
An end for the hate.
Lay down, be still.
This won't be long.

I promise Hell.
I hold your hope.
I take it all.
I ask for naught.
Your soul. Your shame. Your sin. Your faith.
Release repaid. Even exchange.

I am nothing
if not a lover of life,
but I am no friend to you.

My hands grasp with knives.
My gaze devours.
My lips speak only light.

But I am a bearer of gifts,
possessed of a singular compassion
begging your assent.

It is enough.

I want you.

Give me your agony.
Give me the nails that pierce your bone.
Give me your shrieking love,
the quivering kiss of a thousand tongues.

It will be enough,
and I'll hold it all in.

I'll hold it in.

We have towers,
and the memory of trees.
We have our limbs of steel,
our leaves of glass,
ceramic bark and rubber sap;
concrete roots and cold cores
for the thought of hardwood hearts.

We have synthesis, prosthesis,
a red hand-stamp denying provenance.
Glory without precedence,
our very own uncaused causes
raising miracles from dead earth,
inert pasts and petrified origins.

All ours.

We have our forests filled with mirrors,
crawling with mechanical spiders,
our domestic swarm.
Gunmetal birds with L.E.D. eyes
watching from the canopy,
watching us surge along
with all our godlike muscle.
Forward.

Always forward.

What is left, when the divide grows so vast, that we forget there is another side? An island here, in cold gloaming, drifting among the ravages, out of sight of the only shore I seek. I did not notice at first, but the air is foul, and there are cankers on my hands. I leave a mottled trail as I walk within my little circle, molting to the fire. It seems it has always been thus.

At first, I would grasp, blind without the light I have shed, but there is no purchase here, only the distant drone of hungers unfed. I cannot see the scars for the scales bequeathed my skin. I am... fulfilled, the sovereign of my own isolate realm, with only the wind, singing the rumor of Hell, to observe my reign.

Something crawls in the abyss below, but it cannot reach me. Not yet.

There is solace in forgetting.
A lost man's comfort in wandering.
The balm of the mad,
Apathy and indifference.
Armors of the mind;
Jailers of the heart.

The hoary elder breathes his last,
And remembers nothing,
A lifetime of summers lost to the living,
The burden of winters lifted from him.

The widow burns the house of her memory
And casts the ashes to a heedless wind.

The children run in blindness,
Fleeing the specter on the horizon,
Embracing the ephemeral.

The unborn dream in darkness
And know eternal life.

I see you
reflected in the lapis-crown discarded,
your face a mask of indifference and regret
as your hands grow white upon the throne.

I hear you
in the breeze that sings your praise no more,
mere echoes to and of your glory,
absent of the hate you never spoke.

I taste you
in silvern springs turned foul,
recalling the water's sweetness
before you opened your veins to poison the stream.

I smell you
in the carrion carried away,
their plight unequal to ashes
that were as snow before your penultimate dawn.

I feel you,
in my blood upon the briar-lance,
and I cannot but fall to knees
that for ages have refused to bend.

Where have you gone?
I still recall the resolve in your farewell,
bitterness masking anguish,
as I took wing upon the wind of change.

I have yearned,
locking away the stars turned black
to pray beneath a cloak of gold,
forgetting principalities forgone.

And I have searched,
laying open my heart on trails through night,
wandering on stones unborn,
contemplating a return to dominion.

I claim the fruit of wisdom rotten,
though I would never bereave myself of life,
and marvel at the chosen tree
split apart where once you touched the Earth.

I collect the dust of children's passion
and fill the cup of pity,
only to wonder at your mercy
and if it is mercy at all.

I sing the serpent's lullaby
that before I disguised as a hymn.
The palace seems to beckon me,
but empty halls offer no allure.

Night falls upon the eaves
and I think of virtues left behind.
Only now can I lie down,
and dream myself to death.

Lama sabachthani?

Here is a garden that shall never die,
and I am lost within it,
abandoned even by anguish;
rooted as a stone in fullest bloom,
a child of nightly unfound heavens
weeping at the grandeur.

Not for want,
nor my precious vanity;
I am spared of vindication,
held aloft on quivering strings
watching the birth of oblivion,
waters rising to the ether's cusp,
gasping at ghosts.

And it wasn't diffidence that stayed my hand,
heeding the sound of breaking bones less the snapping of the quill.
More, I could not write the registry of Time without bias.

Denied the tide,
my vigil is relieved by luminous shadows,
their cowls concealing the effigy of wings,
though I fear the thought of folded fingers hiding knives.

While emotions flounder, a foundation unsettled,
I find myself lashed to vertigo:
wracked by poles,
stretched for significance.

Not for piety,
nor the silence of dead sirens,
I remake myself, contesting the mold,
besieging the world,
nestled snug between columns of faith,
far from reticence; culled of cowardice,
merely masked by malice
for a future more benign.

I woke to the sound of lynching,
with the shivering sun crawled
in naked witness from my home
out into the winter streets, newborn
to discovery and with it, the rebirth
of fear,
for the doves who left to warmer havens
and of the walls so high around me
framing the dawn in its ponderous justice,
heaving with shadows in the morning's apologia,
its distant regard transfiguring flame to unchanging
frost,
with the sound of only bare feet upon the rimy planks
to break the quiet of my reverie,
before the pallid gleam of hope went out,
constricted with a noose of passing moments,
and when soft hands closed about me,
I could not but follow in acquiescent silence,
even as they draped me 'neath the gallows
and my red-eyed executioner,
from his masked mouth whispered in angelic
remorse, “I'm sorry.”

I confess to a certain...
sympathy,
a spice of pity
coloring the feast of dispossession,
in all its amorous courses.

With arms bruised from the legion embrace,
with mouth worn raw by bloodless kisses,
I stagger in the multitude,
and even in this
I cannot but be more.

They are as trees in a colorless arbor,
stretching desperate roots
into an heliacal abyss,
a variegated ocean,
to its amorphous depths,

like vines,
raising a slow siege against
the trees of the world,
longing for the rapine of apples,
but denied even the dream of savor,

seeking, ever seeking
in the giving
another piece of the feast,
one more bite
from the assuring loaf.

And I feed them.
From my blood I give them water,
from my flesh, the salmon of a thousand lakes.
They think I do this in fraternity.
They think... my words are for their ears.

I stand among them,
wreathed in adulation
as the sun to winter roses,
and they do not wonder why.
They do not taste my words.

Here, beneath the judgment of the skies,
in open wonder to the skepticism of the horde,
I am draped with the mantle of starving love
and crowned in cavalcade
by oaths unto death.

But I cannot see them, only through them,
past the veils and sighs of praise.
When I raise my cup with theirs,
I swallow lead.
I realize...

that I am utterly alone.

We carry the gift
of the most humane hubris,
a vanity only the blind can bear.
In the hallmark of this splendid suffering,
we have become sovereign,
fettered only by a conceptual damnation.
A fundamental sentence of loss.

We are a kind
of promiscuous precision,
wearying the world with gratitude.
With all the trappings of divine denial,
we reign like a palsied spider
in triumphal vigil from the refuse-throne.
An ascendancy of perspective.

We bear the seal
of every honor unearned,
decorating history with meaning.
For all the grace of these mortal mercies,
we ring hollow to the reckoning,
mantled in the dross of lifetimes.
Endowed with the sublime justice of dying.

I took up the pen of truth
and went to write the name of oblivion in my soul,
only to find that it was already there.

In the name of symbiotic suffering,
I demand the answer of love.
For sorrows shared, I relent,
and concede to a moment's joy.

I bled out time, collecting every drop,
and made a well for wishing
doom upon each and every star.

We hold hands with broken fingers,
and every reaffirming squeeze
brings comfort side-by-side with pain,
but my grip is growing weaker.

I walked the floor of the abyss
and allowed myself to dream,
giving birth to a cosmos in all its splendor of decay.

This is the underlying sentiment,
the existential crutch and the most insidious of drugs.
This is the vampire's Nirvana, the kiss of a saprophyte angel.
And I will never give it up.

I went looking for God in the forest,
but found only unburied dead.
They died without mercy,
died without justice.
This is the world of the born,
of the trauma of life and its vicious relent.
Throats savaged in clinging moments,
eyes gored for the sight of truth.
These are my kin,
my perilous neighbors with whispers of bounty,
all fallen away, laid to waste by living,
upon ground that knows nothing of sacrament.

And the sky watches all
as a craven from judgment,
the only true immortal,
ascendant abstraction
protected from pain.

I went looking for a good place die,
well in advance, but even still.
I found a necropolis of temples,
the ruins of unliving stone and nothing more.
I spoke to the emperors of the grave,
plead my case before their gallows-thrones.
Chewing on regret, with mouths filled with dust,
their lips uttered only denials.
I never made demands of the future,
never reached out for angels' hands.
I did not ask for eternity,
but was it so much to wish for, an unfettered soul?

And I will never understand
the cost of my condemnation,
the tax on empathy,
as I open my veins
in consecration.

When I drove the nails through your hands,
was it pleasure?
When I pierced your side,
was there anything left to harm?

We have spoken at length, you and I.
We have suffered the world,
sat amid the agony of high thrones.

And when I broke your legs,
was that thanks I heard?
When I crowned you my God,
did you weep for my loss?

Those words of yours, so long ago,
I remember them.
We were talking of justice.

When I brought them all to witness,
was it not the moment of your glory?
When I made them wail,
did you not feel loved?

As we stood there,
looking down upon the kings,
I could swear I saw you smile.

When I watched you die,
did I think of all we had shared,
our covenant?

I think I did.

I saw that smile, as the flames kissed you,
as your blood turned to poison.
I heard your laughter echoing
against the ceiling of Hell.
I smelled the bliss
of your flesh as it blackened.
I could taste your lust in the air.
I felt your sorrow melt away, your shame.

I watched you suffer, as no man has suffered,
and I knew you wanted more.

They will tell you that
“Life is a precious thing”
and the days will fade
like lies that are nothing to fear
until all that is left
are mornings for mourning,
moments falling like leaves
to the march of an autumn sun.

And he couldn't bear to be there
in the orchard, in the peaks of summer,
seeing split skulls wherever the apples fell,
it's no wonder he ran away.

But the lips of Death say nothing,
sealed tight without a secret to give shape,
no rumor for the nightly wind
to carry off to other airs,
no salience to render from the dawn,
not a word for world to remain.

Alone with a winter storm, she stands
on the last, crownless hill,
all wilting samite, feet curled like withering roots,
our precious wife of God.

In her gaze, the stars reflected,
brazen idols burning in the holocaust of time,
molting death given wings of fire,
incinerating hope in the emptying sky.

And the tempest comes, shrieking havoc,
ripping at her lovely gown,
devouring her breath, consuming every cry
of that crippled voice.

Hear the words, of her prayer,
her singular prayer,
echoed from every child's mouth,
a petal's plunge into a crashing tide.

And she falls, our dearest,
our darling bloom, she falls,
there upon that hill, kneeling on the bones,
at last the victim of the wind.