Raising. Rising. Lifting.
The foul and desecrated cup.
Despised and despising.
Infernal hells now bear them up.
Wicked tongues now contend
To shatter souls by misleading.
Toxic words will they bend,
Poison masked in gentle seeming.
Make war and put to death,
The gods of these accurséd men.
Make nothing of their breath.
And to thy God—their souls commend.
Stir and rise, lowly Fool,
Let your wisdom be their folly.
Drive back the hellish ghoul
With fire and flame and volley.
The Magician before his work
Is quite unlike The Fool—
To work his will upon the land,
Prepares he every tool.
Beneath the wary Architect—
Bends his stolen power.
By his Devilish instruments—
Falls that mighty Tower.
Play the witness—Sun and Moon—
Gradual his marching,
Inverting Death and Temperance,
His foul Path disheartening.
A Judgement on this weary World,
In madness proclaims He—
But Justice shall Fall on his head,
A Hanged Man cannot see—
A curse upon my father’s house,
And on men such as he
Who in cowardice do espouse
To stand in God, mightily.
In them you’ll find no might.
Neither find you any wit.
They claim prophetic sight
And build up gods from shit.
I dedicate this poem to far-right American White Evangelical Christians everywhere. May you die as you have lived, and may your God treat you as you have treated others.
You hold who I was, frozen in time. He is but a corpse no longer among the living. How far has he journeyed from you. How much more has he become.
O, how watchful have I been to see you unmoved. Settled like silt along the banks of fetid waters; deeply rooted like thorns underfoot.
Here we stand. Host of the dead and I. Bear you now your arms, for neither can live while the other yet draws breath. Come and find my vanities forespent.
A bloated body
Floated gracefully by.
Swollen and buzzing,
Swarming with flies.
Its eyes like milk.
Its skin a mottled grey.
Adorned in silt
On a bright summer’s day.
The first time I saw a ghost, I was a small child lying in bed. Overhead in pitch darkness, her light drew near and retreated–drew near and retreated–in unnatural rhythm and pattern unrepeated. It wouldn’t be the last time some strange and inexplicable thing I’d encounter. Twenty years later, I’d reach out for disbelief to be shattered in the thrill of hearing, “Holy God, help me. Pray!” I have not yet shaken the chill, still riding my spine.
Where were you when God lost his way? When his silence spurned debates over who to love and who to hate? Where were you when love we crucified, or when we throttled grace until it died? Premeditated murder in first degree. Even these, my hands, are bloody.
She fell like rain.
Like a star.
Graceful
Up until the crash.
A lifetime of being there
Until one day she wasn’t.
Gone in an instant.
Erased from time.
Leaving behind
Only the smudge lines of her smile.
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