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Xiola Nov 18
Paint:
me in tar, dredged from your judas soul
Where you once stored my love:
a devotion-less hole

Truth:
A shame-bound train and you’re tied to its track
Hypocrisy:
A thrown boomerang always finds its way back

Pray:
with your queen in your false praise of god
Bury:
your guilt in her sanctimonious nod

“How loud must it scream
Before I will hear?”
Craft your hollow platitudes
Into your pious veneer

See,
I know

the putrid self-loathing
That screams from within
How loud must it scream
For you to accept your chagrin?
kian Mar 2021
I can’t remember the first time I did it-
Flashing silver in the place of blood-true red inside my mouth.
To me, that was the worst. There was
no moment I could drag myself to,
screaming crying cowardly, and make it better.
No rhyme nor reason for the
twist inside of me.

At night I prayed for some forgiveness,
but I stopped going to Mass before my Confirmation and even I knew there could be no
True deliverance without repentance⁠—
53 Hail Marys cannot do what crystal lemon AWESOME does to the pistons of my father’s pickup truck, not
when the engine is
Clutching to its grime
Clinging for synthetic, automated life to the decades worth of caked-on dirt and sludge that
Are what it knows.
Unwilling to be clean.

And so I do not step one foot in church,
Yet I cannot keep my eyes from my mother’s wooden carving of the Last Supper,
Wishing he would turn his eyes to me, as well,
Knowing that he won’t.
Gripping the tablecloth at family dinner,
Seeing my own hand as his, clutching his bag,
Iscariot, my brother, whom I know as though another self.

All sins are the same.
In my own way, I too betray the salt.
Matthew Chen Nov 2019
Oh what have I done
I have betrayed my own
How could it be
I shall hide and depart

Take what you need
Leave no trace behind
Play it safe
No turning back

I am ashamed of my doing
What have I become
I have played the victim
For the devil's deed is done

Will God save me now
I fear for what's to come
I shall run faster
Until I have nowhere to run
And die in abandonment
Don't we have our own Judas in us?
How many times I betrayed myself for two pennies of loneliness?
The act is so old, and after time, poverty is the best teacher,
But there are evergrey examples that never change;
I am one of them, for ever strange.


Did Judas' tinkling silvers burn brands into my hands?
Or by any chance, I am himself, suffering through centuries,
Living my own betrayal against myself and fans;
Just as I sold the prophet for the centuries?


Is there any chance that this world were real, all the happenings?
I truly suffered through histories and left behind all blessings,
Tormented by living and imagining;
I forgot everything about me.
15.09.2019
Nolan Willett Jun 2019
In ancient unenlightened days,
There came a man whose triumph would’ve laid
Foundations for a better world,
Our inner compassions unfurled.
For we thought we found a holy seer,
To rid our lives of all our fear,
To tell us what to say and what to think
What to do and what to drink.
He did his best,
I can attest,
To warn us of that one,
Who would see all our progress undone.
Indeed, many in our history have been
Told what constitutes sin,
Left with a hurtful scar,
By one who never wandered very far.
And our true messiah saw
This prophet for a gaping maw,
Another of the tempter’s tricks,
A man whose touch could heal the sick.
For he loved God more than most
But found him in the cosmos,
Our divine provenance,
Rooted in collective consciousness,
Not an oath to take or die
Or a being to mollify,
Nor any kind of credo,
But an universal ego.
Heeding logic over gullibility
He recognized the liability,
One who would see them die for naught,
And stray them from the insight they sought.
But in trying to break the cycle
He heralded its arrival,
Enshrining the son,
In the cursed three-in-one.
He made a martyr
And thus followed generational slaughter.
Promising sacred haven,
Causing war and famine.
For deceivers are known to appear as savior,
For them there is no pleasure greater,
In casting down the righteous,
And rendering them mindless.
And so millennia could have been spared
From some cruelty our kind have shared-
So long and so onerous, never ending-
And our pity’s rending.
The earth’s inhabitants coalesced,
No longer their souls oppressed,
Saved from prejudice,
Alas, poor Judas.
Sorry I published this a couple times I had to fix some things and I like it so
Her decision had been made.


She snuck in, past the guards, during the very early hours of the morning. Having found his cell, she stopped and stared at him. In the darkness, she could see his swollen face, beaten so badly, she thought him nearly unrecognisable. This, she had not expected. She made the journey because she convinced herself that she needed to see him one last time. To tell him she was sorry, that everything was going to be ok, and he would back in his home soon, surrounded by his family. But now here, those words would not come. She was too afraid, and even more ashamed to call-out to him. She stood motionless for 15 minutes (maybe more). Still no words came. As she left, she heard him mutter - but she did not stop. She kept her eyes forward, carefully slipping past the guards once more, never looking back.
Ariel Neves Jan 2019
Praise be the One who was, who is, and is to come!
The One who takes away the pain
The One who takes away the shame
The One who restores the lame
How beautiful is He!
I fall to his feet and plea
“Find favor in me”
I’ve betrayed you with a kiss and you still call me friend?!
How can this be?
I PRAY THAT ALL WILL SEE
Truly how beautiful is He!
Francie Lynch Jan 2019
Judy took the silverware,
More than thirty pieces;
Entered by the front alone,
She made it look so easy.

She carried off twelve settings,
And tongs and butter knives;
She covered then with velvet plush
To hide from curious eyes.

It turned out to be an inside job,
A sneak thief in daylight,
With more than thirty pieces,
Long tarnished in my sight.
The shine is off the silver too.
Ellie Wolf Aug 2018
When its emerald eye glimmers in the shadow of the dusty shelf above
I pause,
I sense a presense.

It is not unlike me to attribute human characteristics to inanimate objects.
Give them names and nicknames and quirky character traits based on how their forms bend.

In the flickering lights of a broke wicken sanctuary though, I do not do it out of habit.

I feel it and stare it back down and see my own reflection in the cracked gems that once were a soul.

A gaudy skull.

The kind you see in home video Indiana Jones tributes,
with hats stolen from someone’s parents,
and jackets stolen from someone else’s elder siblings,
and ketchup for blood.

The kind your quirky local manic pixie dream girl uses to hold incense.

The kind I’m about to waste my money on because I’m an adult now and I can use my millennial minimum wage however I want.

I do not become aware of the possessed nature of my new buddy until I take it back home and hear it snicker in the middle of the night.

I know it is the skull, for my roommate is not one to snicker.

(He chuckles when he’s hiding an opinion and has a villainous laugh when it’s coming from a place of sincerity, but that’s beside the point)

I know it’s laughing at me.
I know this for a fact.

It takes me three more nights to call it out on it because I’ve never been confronted with the issue of standing up to a haunted antique I took home from a secondhand shop, possibly owned by satan’s offspring.
But I’m twenty-one years old and still experiencing some firsts, I suppose.

The gaudy skull is exceptionally snarky.
In a way none of my named plants ever were.
Not even Gerard.

He comes for me for the garbage on the floor and the dust on the windowsill on which he’s propped up, and then later for my poor taste in chore-doing music.

I never ask for its name because I know for a fact he’ll make a game out of it
and I am not in the mood for entertaining ghosts.

I come to realise it all on my own a couple of weeks later.
Once the snark starts to wear off,
and domesticity settles in,
and shared quiet becomes comforting,
despite the circumstances.

It is Judas.

I know this for a fact.

You do not understand the extent to which I am certain that it is Judas.
I have never been so aware of someone’s origins in my entire life.
I bought this creepy item and it is now in my room and I’m developing a weird attachment to it and maybe occasionally use it as a paper-weight and it is Judas.

I feel it in my heart and know it inside of my skull that might be standing on someone else’s touchscreen windowsill
two thousand years in the future,
jade stones for eyes even though I specifically requested amber,
but you get ****** over by bureaucracy even after death.

How do I know it is Judas?

Because I feel him stare at me like he wants to kiss me late at night and sense him plotting my betrayal early morning.

I know it is that, for a fact, because I’ve felt this exact sensation before.

My **** edgy room decor is Judas.

I try to get him to admit it himself by talking of past lovers and reading aloud the surprising number of Jesus metaphor poems I have in my room.
I hate Jesus metaphors, but I do it for that sweet sensation of seeing someone trying to dodge the inevitable once it’s coming at them like a mule through Rome piloted by the son of god.

I know he’ll cave eventually and tell me
and I know it’ll be the same caliber of glorious news as Jesus coming out of his own cave of burial,
resurrected and preaching winning.
I know I’ll win.

And I think to myself that maybe I am in the mood to entertain and just haven’t found the right outlet yet.
Maybe history’s most infamous apostle is It.
The original sinner and the original rebel.

(I’m aware it’s technically Cain, the jealousy-ridden son of Adam and Eve, but I only ever count the gays)

Judas and I have bonded.

And I can tell he’s on the verge of telling me his dark and twisted backstory. Again, I have felt this sensation before.

And when it happens, we can talk
about what it’s like being demonised by the one you love
and being the odd one out in your devotee friend group, even though you eat bread and drink wine and worship metaphor just like them.
And how patriarchal institutions distort history to pedal the same tired spiel of everything having a place and everything being there for a reason.

But we both know that isn’t true
because neither of us feel like part of god’s plan or created in anyone’s image.

And we can listen to sad music about wanting to kiss the wrong people together.

And that’s all I ever wanted from a friendship.
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