Something is alive here,
Something is begging, something is clawing its way kicking and screaming and biting and gnashing it's way into becoming, suffering the thousand sharpened teeth of transition just to know what it means to feel as though as it definitively is, rather than is not, rather than in between,

Father, I am sinking
Mother, I am coming through the floorboards
Brother, I have abandoned you

******* away eternities on porches and defying the skies of childhood, I saw you, red faced and vicious, a shadow sick of living in contrast, you yearn to be free, to shake your context and exist for the sole purpose of your own continuation, like paintings on the walls and objects in space, you crave the weightlessness, totality of purpose, absence of justification or need, divine freedom that kills the divine and births a new path


Walk this with me,
Stranger, lover, friend
We will know what it means to be unified,
Unbreakable will of the collective soul,
We will be human,
We will be grateful,
And we will be more

The Hierophant stands stoic and looming at the alter,
He is Father, Patriarch, Divine Daddy,
Secondary mouth of God and arbiter of his will,
His hands are twin bridges offering you two choices:
Walk the path of obedience and you will be clean and holy eternal, golden armored against the beasts of this world, promised heir to the ever burning horizon of an infinite kingdom, you will be chosen and righteous, you will walk the verdant fields of bountiful harvest and reap your rewards from this life to the next,
Walk the path of strife, however, and you will become the heretic, pariah, enemy and other, outcast and tied to the stakes of the pious, scapegoat for the evil that dwells within, you will die a thousand martyred deaths before they lay your restless spirit to damnation,
As he stands before me, his face is at once reassuring and mocking,
He is my father, he is the president, he is the unknowable face of creator and absolute authority,
He says, boy, take the easy way out, it is the only chance you'll ever have
I don't know what it was that pushed me over the edge then,
Whether it was the midnights spent crossing myself in the Lord's Prayer out of sublime terror,
The smell of formaldehyde as the most pious woman I've ever known was returned to the dirt under a benediction,
Bruised knees, ****** knuckles, diagnosis or spite:
Regardless, I made my choice there,
I choose strife,
I choose the unending chaos,
I will walk this path to its end,
And when I meet my maker there,
I will tell him that it was worth it

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

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