Enter the Temple

I am undone.

How can you look upon me?

My hands have killed the innocent.

Their blood covers my conscience.

My conscience which rebelled

Against the Real, the True.

I am undone.

When you reach towards me,

When you hold my face,

So softly, gently, tender,

Do you love or me or despise

The errant death that I've become?

I am undone.

My lips, unclean, my filthy

Tongue and heart. Have always

Wandered and destroyed your art,

Your beauty. My lamentations,

Do they offend your ears?

I am undone.

Now place the coal upon my lips.

I am undone, for they are foul.

Cleanse them, burn them, recreate them,

I have seen your face.

Your PURITY astounds me.

I am undone.

Lo, this hath touched thy lips;

And thine iniquity is taken away,

And thy sin purged.

Fang and Fire

Sometimes when I feel bold,
Bored of games and tricks,
I take you off—
Tear you off, really.
I shed you (like a venomed serpent
Trades his rotten skin for beauty).
But only once.

I hate you.
Your ugly tendrils cover me
With promises of freedom.
They mold me.
Draconian myth!
Your sullen whispers
reek of suffocating safety
(There is evil lurking here).

But fearing and doubting Heaven
(And his sword— his claws),
I hide in your embrace.
I absconded deep within
My trap for you.
Surely its better here
Than gasping in your pool,
Uncovered, flayed.

No subtle ploy
can lure me from this play.
Though boldness comes
and though I wake
I must (must) sleep
That you might dream.
So I breathe deep
And drown again.

Mendacity

Sometimes real things vanish.
Their shadows linger on as an echo of a scream.
A scream, a tear, a torn thing.
Once true; now lies.

Sometimes True things aren't.
They're masqueraded and pretended. Masked by friends,
Also pretenders, and all their children run and hide and
Vomit and die.

Sometimes I'm the falsehood.
And a slough of self deceiving flattery flows through my fingertips.
But not my True and Real and Self alone
lies floundering in my dereliction.
I release my mendacious
offspring and they
fly; I will not
be the only
one to
cry.

Jack

Cycles, dust motes, dragonflies,
Lyrics to a reel gone by,
Are to me nostalgic song.
In the window will I see
Restored, revised, new memory?
Eventually all hopes are clouds.

Fall sunlight suspends
A speck of regret.
In clouds, through windows,
There! - it flies off.
Here sometimes and then not.

Live
Eat
Why?
I
Sleep.

Pyre

Burn me to the ground.
Watch my ashes waft away.
As memory drifts and falls
Into obscurity so shall my name
Decay and surely wane.
So burn me bright.
That in the blazing light
Of my demise some other might
See my ashes, my lost aspiration's height
And think them, somehow, worthy of new flight.
Perhaps then someday hence
My dreams, soaring so proudly now
Over a dawn that seems as
Bright and hopeful as Deus Vult
Will someone else's night
Fill with a thundering delight
And with another's arms
Raise all to higher, greater sights.
For this I burn.
Coals and sparks and flames
I cannot help.