The machete of death is
Coming closer closer closer
Blood and bones and
My eyes are strained
From too much existential contemplation.

Not good for the soul
To consistently ideate
About it’s utter and absolute distinction;
Throwing your living body, your living soul,
Swiftly and without warning into
A raging flame that cobbles you up
Hungry to dissolve you, disjoint you,
Consume you into her wild flames.

Blood red and yellow as the surface of the sun
All breaking down into
The black gravely ash.

Where something cognizant
And living and organic and dynamic
Has fallen from grace like Satan falling
From his place in heaven
Arch-angel transformed into the anti-christ

And at times, I relate
I feel myself falling falling falling
Like Lucifer
And Alice
And Persephone.

We are falling and we cannot stop.

From our homes, the only ones we’ve ever known
Tumbling manically into a new world
Whose rules we were never told
Whose customs are foreign
Whose reality fills us with this
Dread of confusion.

Once we were home.
In heaven
Reading a book in the dabble sun
Spreading spring and life with
Our mother Demeter
And in a moment
It all changed

Without warning
Without any choice in the matter
So we watched outside ourselves
As our bodies flailed through the air
Our lungs bursting with screams
Our bodies lost to our own control,
Now just flesh being dropped
From Olymus to an upside world.

And yet…
We grew to love it
The devil, Alice, Persephone and I.

We learned to love our forced new world
And decided there was something majestic
About climbing through time and space
Traversing reality
Entering into a new world that flittered---
Terrifying at first, like the slit from a knife,
But then glowing, glinting with flame
And pomegranate and tea parties.
And as lost as we were
We began to find our way.

We sat down with the mad hatter,
We stopped ourselves form being swallowed
By our own gushing, oceanic tears.
We grew large and small.

We came to reign a dark, black world
That somehow become our own
So sinister, gaping with evil, think
With the sinners. But still, in my own way,
Perhaps the heavenly remnants inside me
Loved them. Watched them float here from
Their corpses like dancing skeletons on display
And I welcomed them into my dungeon
Of fire and flame and blackness and death.
I punished them. And yet, I loved them.
Punishing them like my children,
Wreaking the havoc they had caused.
They were sinners and they were mine
And no longer was I ugly and tarred and shamed,
A monstrosity. Suddenly, I was my own god.
And my sinners, so broken, hearts filled with black bile
Spewing out angry and hatred and violence.
But they were mine and all the fear
I used to hold that I was a sinner,
Not good enough to be good,
Dissipated. I was here in the bleakest part of
The universe, a black hold that gaped on for hours
With spikes and flames and wading pools of human blood.
I was a monster among monsters. They were my monstrous
Children, soulless, void of humanity,
And yet inside of my some fleeting thing existed
An undestroyed part of my early life:
For I loved them. I love their sins and I drank them
In like blood and wine. We are all sinners, but the sinners
Who have made their way here…their sins are so catastrophic
I believe they may in fact be divine.