"Breathless night, cloak me in your shadows and silence"

Consecrate the ceremony
Or bear the oblation
See you this maiden whore
With whom you wish to copulate

You see her beauty - I see the skull beneath the skin
I smell the fragrant dusk of graves and the yellowed linen
"Calamity of fate!" - the portents cry
She longs to join the earth

Until all is but an elysian field (beset with glistening urns)
A desolate, echoing cinerarium rattled by the winter wind
Merciless, I raise the cup. I beseech it be filled
I am the celebrant in this rite of shrouds.

We abscond to ashes and dust occludes us all.

If your embrace were a chrysalis
I would weather callous frosts - or die inside.
A madrigal, slow-breathing
Your pale shoulders and flow of hair
Solitude, what have you done?

My lifeless fingers trace the surface
For these lines exist in lithic memory
In colonnades where light, weight, and form
Shatter like a thousand breaking bones
Above a sea of twisted limbs
What have you done?

Fuck your beautiful world
The doubt in your heart made no amends
The doubt in your heart left nothing for me
I often return to the frozen ground where I laid with you
When I gaze across the fields I understand the beauty of dying leaves
And why the dying trees reach to touch a faraway sun
And why I have become a forlorn wreck of fleeting intangibles
My better nature scorched in the crucible that is you
I hate, yearn, despair and lust
Desire, what have you done?

What have I become?

I am nothing. I am nothing. Nothing.

Falling, sightless, the final hours have passed
The soul becomes flightless
The silence of the grave, the evensong
Bereft of form and void
Deadlights dance in the séance obscure
And the damned lick the black tendrils of hastur

Conjoined amidst the circles nine
The prophecy of the soil and secret rites of the worm
An ossuary of flesh amongst all our living tombs.
Crawling, limbless, through the pale valleys displaced of time
Our lidless eyes forward to the ever-fixed mark
This worm-web known as mortality

A single, labyrinthine tier across the yawning abyss
Whose walls are featureless and purchase - impossible
And so begins the litany of the lie
Scraping the precipice toward the slough of despond
I have found strange purity in this oblivion. Impending dissolution brings no pause Upon ashen splinters is my body - which is given for you
I call the vermin to their feast, and the worms to paradise

The body, a painting in abstract
Contorted hues, framed by steel and tubes
Reflection of youth and beauty. Smashed, splintered, nothing
Fragments, as words - meaningless
Remnants of flesh - pallid, forlorn
An object in this gallery of living corpses and surrogate breath
Begotten, the invalid. In wreckage, and broken glass adorned
Angles unkind, joylessly entwined. This palette of ruin that Celia becomes.

The body, a study disfigured
She is God's own art. Contusion of youth and beauty
Crushed, crippled, yielding. Motion, as time - intangible
The verdigris of subsequent decay
Suffusing the sickroom, the wheelchair, the needles, the hours, the days
Forgotten, the invalid. Pristine the canvas, the certainty, the stain
Flawless design, sorrowfully refined
The fragile art of Celia is done.

Scourged with whips, and thorn-crowned
Bear your cross on the way of sorrows
On these narrow streets your people leer and spit:
"Rome condemns you, Her gods condemn you!"
Stripped naked and bound with rope and iron
Christendom dies with you on this hill in Judea
And is reborn - crawling through the Calvary filth like flies on carrion
Tetha malkuthak - your kingdom come.

Son of Mary, we share the cup of struggle and betrayal
For your beloved of Earth revile me
They tear the flesh of my palms in deposition
And excoriate me without succor at the pillar of your church
Their baleful assurances have become the Via Crucis
Where my body is bloodied and my frail form broken
They have paved my path to Golgotha with usury and deceit
In Heaven as on Earth.

Salvation is famine, and faith - a hateful diadem
I await revealing beneath a mantle of heavenly silence and to silence I shall return
They raise their nails to my wrists and cast lots for my worth
In their eyes I am the apostate
They bring the judgment of Caiaphas and the mockery of Pilate
They cast their derision - their damnation - as a spear into my side
And in a lifetime's anguish it is accomplished.

Rise, you promised life unending yet emptiness remains
Fleeting traces of sheol
Sutures bind the eyes and seal the mouth
And the trocar's incision disembowels
Around me they lay their hands in prayer
Through me, they touch eternity
Death is my religion
As Lazarus, I rise embalm the soul in darkness and cross the field of flies.

Rise, I abhor you, reject you, lament you, absolve you
Laid to rest, no flesh shall be spared
Your kingdom's crown lies in rotting soil.
And your servants moulder in the earth
Your salvation never was nor is
It will not be again

Death is my religion
As Lazarus, I rise, entomb the soul in darkness and cross the field of flies.