In this prayer I ask to be set ablaze,
Stripped naked strapped down gasoline veins cut open bleeding combustion into the engine of history,
I ask to be melted down to my base elements - animus, spirit, wrath, righteousness and judgement,
I ask to be cleansed and sanctified, to rise at last from my knees as smoke and heat, drifting above all things and in defiance of them,
I ask to become the heretic, the witch, the conjuror and the saint,
I ask to be consumed by an eternal fury and become holy - embers in the great kiln of becoming
In this prayer I ask to become - to know what it feels like to be created again,
To feel as the atom split,
The kindling ignited,
The match struck,
I ask to know what it means to be a light that cannot be extinguished,
And with this prayer, may I light up this night, and all the nights to come

When I grow up, I wanna be a heretic
Save some rope for me, all you hangmen, all you executioners, all you arbiters of holy justice,
Grab your axe and cut down this forest,
Use the wood to build the biggest pyre the world has ever seen,
Chains around my wrists and my feet,
A crown of thorns staining my golden hair red,
And that blood is the last vestige of my humanity, running down my chin and dripping onto the grass
It is the last thing I taste before you light me up,
The fire opens my skin like a present it's been eagerly awaiting all year,
Takes its fill of my blood and ***** what's left from my bones, and seeps into what remains
In that moment I become one with my destroyer,
I become that which scorches earth and blackens sky,
I am the inferno that swallows empires,
I am Rome 64, Chicago 1871, London 1666,
I am the prophesied beast,
The end of days,
I am apocalypse and I come for you and yours,
I am the anti-life, and I will leave your cities in ashes and your fields barren
I grow a hundred feet tall then, screaming up into the night like Hell come calling,
You will watch me wither to nothing this way,
You will sweep what is left of me into your dustbins, something you will dispose of with the rest
But do not mistake,
Wherever you go, and whatever you do,
You will never escape that night, when you lit me up, and I became something endless,
You will always be living in the shadow I cast

In this prayer I ask the oceans to consume me,
To be submerged in something greater,
A totality of weightlessness and power,
To fill my ears, lungs and mouth,
And sink, low into the basin of history
In this prayer I am washed clean and righteous,
Baptized by salt and born again,
I do not ask you to reach out,
I only ask you sing of the descent,
I do not ask you to take my hand,
I only ask you keep your eyes on me,
Keep my memory close and weave it thread by thread into the sails you will use to one day leave this place, when the wind is kinder and the waves calmer,
Know then, as you look out over the horizon that I will be with you until the shoreline
And that with this prayer, I may drown, but I may never die

It's too late for me my friends
Pacing around my kitchen with a half empty bottle of Red Stripe I write this poem to you
To anyone who gives a **** enough to pay attention and listen to all the nonsense that leaves my lips
I am a man with no realistic goals
I am a man who does not listen to the battle cry that beats in his chest and forces it's way through his veins
Instead I plug my ears because I know what danger would come from action
I am a slave to inaction
And I've been told that a slave that doesn't defy their master is not yet deserving of their freedom
While I don't believe that's the truth, I let it apply to me
Because I am a coward
Nothing I want is attainable
None of my dreams are feasible
I have lost more times than I can count
But maybe if I lose enough, it will mean someday I've won
Because I don't want to live a quantifiable life of wins and losses
Successes and failures
I want a life that is worth getting up each morning
A life of joy that is armed to the teeth
Because from John Brown to Emiliano Zapata
From Spanish barricades to French communes
I believe that the heroes who fail are the only one's worth having
Because in failure there is always action
There is sincerity and the feeling that what one is doing must happen eventually
So why not now?
What is stopping me from saying "no more shall I live a life that isn't according to the what I believe"
I believe in a life like the hardships of Paul
"Sorrowful but always rejoicing
Poor yet making many rich
Having nothing yet possessing everything"
Alone I must build for myself a life worth living
And together we can build a world we can finally call home

I am the truth,
The way,
The light,
One day I will prove this to you,
I will weave this world into mythology, watching from high as the golden strands of my hair reach down and wrap around everything, bringing it within me and me within it, I will grow brighter this way, I will grow so bright that I will blind you when you try to come close, I will rise unstoppable through the ceiling into the sky, I will float to that place in heaven where all my memories are and I will lather my body in them, I will be a mural depicting the greatest triumph this world has ever seen, stretching from Olympus to Venus, daring the sun to set on me, daring you to turn the page and move on to another story of vanity and power, and you, inevitably, do,
We all know what happens to Icarus in this one, we always know that at the end of this there is fire, then water, and then nothing,
There is a tragedy in all of us,
The one in which we die a thousand deaths, and one, before we know for sure whether or not we were worth it all along,
The one in which we never get any closure,
The one in which we grow so big,
So vast and untamable,
So bright and so holy,
That when something bigger, and crueler, comes along to crush us back into the Earth,
We forget how to teach ourselves to burn again,
So when I bury my pride,
I will ask you, voice shaking,
For a light,
For the way,
For the truth,
And when you give it to me, I will know what it means to be grateful, to be nothing, in the arms of eternity where I am small, and human, and alive, and imperfect, and in those faults I will at last know myself, and when we meet properly for the first time I will tell him,
"The fall is beautiful,
But down here,
You can see everything so much clearer"

XIII-II. Death: The Sound and the Fury

I remember vividly losing the faith of my grandmother, I was standing holy as you like over my great grandmothers grave as they returned her to the Kentucky dirt that raised her, and my grandmother, one wrinkled hand clutching mine as if I were the reaper himself, the other wrapped so tightly around a bible I didn't know whose skin might split open first, hers or gods, and then I walked to the edge of the world and looked down, into a canopy of tree tops so dense no light could break through, so strong and so intertwined that neither man nor machine could pierce within, and when it began to rain there I lifted my scarred veins to heaven and I begged for absolution, I begged to be washed clean of sin and diagnosis and become pure, later, when my best friend plunged a needle into his veins for the first time I couldn't watch, I looked instead to that same Kentucky sky, I thought about how maybe God goes by a different name to everybody, I thought about how that sky must have looked to my grandfather as he charged across this land with horse and pistol and saber, and if he thought God meant freedom or a new empire of chains, when I look around here I think about all those people marching towards death all thinking they might be the one, the one to conquer time and become greater than, to live out eternity as the archetypal hero, the one who brings sunrise to an endless night and lifts the world up off its knees, I think about what the air must feel like to them as they die, thin and sharp and nostalgic, with the hint of a promise broken the last taste on their lips, and I want to visit each of their graves and ask them if it was worth it, if they had won or lost or if victory was an illusion made for fools and politicians, men of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and by the time I at last turn back towards my friend and open my mouth to tell him this, he is already gone, he is gone now and the land desolate - the sky holds no more hope than the soil here, and so I wonder when he started digging the grave they put him in, and I wonder too if I've begun digging yet, where they will lay me to rest, and when, but here I am with no one to ask so I wonder, I go on and I wonder

Omens,
Warning signs and aching bones,
Dark clouds and distant thunder,
The house will fall tonight and take me with it,
Spill me into the street to wash away come rain,
I sit at the table, watching cracks form in the ceiling over bowed heads and quiet contemplation,
I feel myself lifted from the floor,
I am formless in the living room, transcribing conversations to my skin in dead languages, my body a desecrated temple of hieroglyphics nobody can read,
I am breathless in the bedroom, feeling the heat of passion on my skin and absorbing none of it, fault lines manifesting under my fingernails as I sink into someone else's tragedy,
I am weightless on the porch, dreaming of one day being swallowed by something monstrous enough to have me, swallowed by something monstrous enough to profane the sky with its arrogance and come out the other side steel, unbreakable, sharp and remorseless,
When I return to my body I am deathless - I am the unwelcome traveler of worlds, a ghost haunting my own life, these friends and lovers have been host to a parasite, a restless thing of no shape and no blood of its own,
I resolve to surrender to the coming storm,
As I rise, they fall one by one,
My brothers to their pride,
My friends to their rage,
My lovers to their desperation,
And as I walk out into the street, I am caught by flashes of lightning and moonlight, and I turn back to watch the house crumble, brick by brick, into the lonesome fog of forgetting

What in this world can I understand but me?
Whose pain is this if not mine?
Whose voice is this if not mine?
All I can ever be is my Self
All I can ever truly know is me and mine
I live in the shadow of my own Ego and I know **** well I cannot escape it
Max Stirner you tell me I should only act in my self interest
You tell me that all things are my property if only I reach out and take them
But do you know what it is I want Max?
You have never met me
I worry that what I want would be a hell for the people I care about
You must have had the luxury to not have anger like mine
You must have not ever experienced the fire in the back of your mind and the bricks in the pit of your stomach when life throws you for a loop
You don't know how bitter I can become
Can your egoism really help me?

Max I look into the mirror and wonder if that's you I see
Hiding in my mind behind my irises peering back
I had such distaste for the things you preach but why was I so fixated on letting the world know that?
And suddenly it's all clear
Max Stirner you are my shadow
You are everything about myself that I have trouble accepting
You are every clenched fist at the thought of someone I love loving someone else
You are every scowl on my face when I feel like I'm surrounded by people who don't give a **** about what I have to say
You are every night I stewed in my own mind because nothing went how I wanted

When I first wrote this poem,
I wanted to be rid of my ego
I want to live a life where I'm never in the way of anyone pursuing what they want
And I still do
So what do I do now?
Because you aren't entirely wrong Max
I am free when I take responsibility for my actions it's true
Maybe I am the unique one, the creative nothing, the indescribable qualities that make me who I am
And so is everyone else
And just because I say something is "mine" doesn't mean that it can't also be "ours"
Do I want to be a good man because it is in my self interest to do so?
Do I possess the tools to set myself free?
And is love nothing but a ghost of my mind?
A spectre that disappears as soon as I reach my hand out to it?
Do I love because it pleases me to do so?
They tell me love is just a bunch of chemicals in my brain anyway
But ****** it's my brain and it's my chemicals
They are mine
They are my property

So Max, we might not agree in our anarchism
At the end of the day I believe in causes and powers bigger than myself
But I have a respect for your beliefs
Because I know all too well
All I can ever be is me
All I can ever understand is my self

I chose an eternity of this,
Sunken eyes, deep divisions, stranglehold of memory and fondness, melancholy high, morning after in radio static chaos, nothingness with vividly painted imagery, something from nothing again and again,
I feel you in my chest, in all pockets of mind and body, like Siamese twins joined forever, I cried the day we were born and now I place bets on which of us will go first, me in my wrath, or you in your sorrow,
Your hands run up my back now, in the dark somewhere far away, cold lips on my cheek and hot hands around my throat,
You're asking me, what color I'll be buried in while I scream at the night,
Is it always like this?
Is it always like this?
You pull me into the floor,
I hold on and I sink,
I can't remember now, which one of us was holding the steering wheel,
Which one of us twisted the cap on the pill bottle,
Which one of us held the blade,
Which one us was nothing, who didn't need who anymore
Which one of us decided to destroy ourselves, in order to destroy the other
But I remember screaming,
I remember throwing my head back and releasing you into the air,
And asking you again,
Is it always like this?
Is it always like this?
I catch you on the comedown like we were trapeze artists,
I hold you close and you kiss me hard,
And you whisper,
It is always like this,
It is always like this

Heads swimming, tail lights spinning out on back roads, heels ablaze, daze of feeling and complexity - context that governs harshly, danger that waits, disease that lingers, hides in hair and clothes and bedrooms and comes out to watch you sleep, eyes behind glass, whispers in the dark, so slow it hurts,
Strangers in passing, lovers in waiting, stoners and liars and thieves,
I didn't know what to make of this then, ghosts of autumn haunting cell block courtyards haunt minds mismanaged and clouds of smoke, dangerous things that live here and don't pay rent,
5 chimes on a bell tower,
5 warning signs for 5 years,
5 roads traffic jammed to 5 kids funerals dead this year from 5 needles, one pricked vein is all it takes to collapse an empire of ego,
I remember when there was good in their eyes, now all I can think of is how fast I can drive home without falling apart on another highway,
Something is better than nothing I say,
Lured back to that place by the smell of something sweet, see, that's my problem,
I get too close, I bite in before I've taken the necessary precautions, I just can't resist the scent,
I catch my eyes in the rear view, leaned back and hazy with nostalgia,
You can't stay bitter forever,
You can't stay angry forever,
You can't stay here forever,
One time is all it takes, one perfect try,
So here I am again, dwelling on the threshold,
Asking the people inside if they know any good songs while they tie the rope they've been saving for me,
And if there will be light left in the sky on the other side of this,
Cause from where I'm standing, the night ain't slowing down for nobody