Orpheus, Orpheus
How you could charm the sun into rising,
How your father Apollo breathed fire into your divine mortal hands and watched with pride as you learned to make it sing,
They said that with a few strums of a lyre you could create life where there was only silence,
That you could move the trees to dance, the hills to laugh, the water to hum, the air itself to sway in sublime ecstasy,
I could forgive you then,
For thinking you could melt the frozen hearts of gods,
Pluck your love from the jaws of death,
And wake the dead to join you in song,

Eurydice, Eurydice
I know how you must have felt, swept up into something so glorious and beautiful,
To be entranced so completely you’re willing to ignore the warning signs, the prophesied doom and the hubris of men,
You lost yourself in those songs,
And they were all for you, every note he played bore your name and the whole world could only stand in envy
They said you were beautiful, a muse of the purest order,
And when you loved, you loved hard enough to shake the heavens and force them to pay attention,
I could forgive you, then,
For never seeing it coming,
The perfection shattered by the fangs of a snake,
Who has time, after all, to watch the ground,
When your heart has taken to the sky?

Orpheus, Orpheus,
How brave you must have felt, how romantic, strolling through the gates of the underworld with only your lyre and your heavy heart,
Confident that it was enough, that all the gods and monsters of this world could be bowed by the sheer force of your love and your melody,
And they were, Orpheus,
You drew tears from the burning gaze of Hades himself, as Persephone sighed in longing,
But you had a lesson to learn, Orpheus,
That the gods are cruel and men imperfect,
You were weak then, Orpheus, as we all must be weak,
Just steps from the light, you looked back to see your love ripped back into the world of shadows,
She had been your shadow all along, Orpheus
For all your beauty, all your power, you wavered in your faith, and doomed the both of you forever,
You, wandering the world eternal with your haunted heart and your mourning songs,
And she, trapped as a phantom too soon in the kingdom of the dead, always wondering why you couldn’t do it, why you couldn’t have just a little more faith,

Orpheus, Orpheus,
I know why you couldn’t do it,
I am just like you,
Held in the grip of fear, uncertain and desperate,
We’re all born that way, I think
Nervous energy faced with insurmountable odds,
Some of us ascend, overcome it all through supreme will and conviction,
Some of us descend, meet our devils where they live and lose the games they play,
But we all falter somewhere,
Even once, even one small mistake,
Sometimes that’s all it takes,
Orpheus, I can forgive you, then,
There’s not a soul alive who wouldn’t have looked back

Something else is here,

Something isn't right,

Imposter empires,
Gilded knives and false flags,
Come, let your towers rise

Fill my mouth with wine,
My ears with honey,
My hands with flesh,
My eyes with light,
Petrify me inch by inch,

The feeling hungers to be lived in,
It's teeth graze my neck,
It sings of blood and prophecy,
Epoch of an age-
Marked by moonlight cataclysm,
Drifts of smoke and drums of war,
The blinds open,
The feeling consumes

This is not my body,
This is a Trojan horse,
Omen of plague,
Biblical negligence,
Genesis of epilogues,
After the credits apology,
Consolation prize,
Fate cut short and luck run dry,
A type of magic nobody believes in,
Some revelations have to be swallowed whole,
Like police lights in the windows at the party,
Or locusts in the skies of Egypt,
You have to realize when you've gone too far, and walk away while you can

I’m at war with the art form, conflict of the purpose and the self, I want to rip the most honest parts of myself out and crucify them on this stage, I want a spectacle so pure it gives you all nosebleeds, I want to make myself understood,
What happens if I can’t explain my position? How can I justify myself to you?
How can I explain to you what this feels like?
Feels like the highway lines I used to romanticize grew teeth, started dragging on like decades across wrists made ****** at the tip of a pen,
Feels like the distance crawled into my head, crackling like exhausted lightning begging to be recognized,
Feels like I could tear my rib cage open and light a cigarette off this ****** heart, yeah, desperate times & all,
I got a crime scene inside this body tonight, I’m hanging around waiting to get violated, subjugated, overcome with superior violence,
Strip me naked and love me like a firing squad, yeah I guess we all wanna end like this,
I guess we all desire power, or to be crushed by something powerful,
That’s why we give birth to God every night,
Drink deep of the waters of life, and live the **** thing,
Right? I should know this by now,
But here I am, godless and vicious,
Waiting on an apocalypse that shares my name, and praying like hell,
For the soul of the world to come, after all of this

In the garden of Gethsemane, at the foot of the Mount of Olives, Jesus witnessed firsthand the sins of all mankind,
He said,
Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by,
But father, if this cup cannot pass by, but I must drink it, your will be done
The spirit is willing if the flesh is weak
The spirit is willing if the flesh is weak
The spirit is willing if the flesh is weak
And so he went to his death fully secure in his purpose, then he rose, and he never stopped rising,
I've often thought about what that might be like,
To take it all in, all the colossal and insurmountable context of being, all the agony and joy, love and rage, and find your place within it,
To know where you stand in relation to all of it,
And isn't that why we're all here?
Isn't that the answer we're all burning for?
I ain't been a man of God in some time y'all,
My god got buried in the rain one morning in spring on the other side of 75 and I ain't sat in a pew since,
But when my god told me,
Never let anyone claim you if your name does not fit holy into their mouth,
I started speaking tongues wrapped in ****** so nobody could ever misunderstand me again,
When my god told me,
Never be afraid of the wind, for one day it will be all that is left to carry you,
I became a storm from which there is no shelter except my eyes,
When my god told me,
Never let anyone see you dressed in black who would be uncomfortable to see you dressed in gold,
I ripped up all the pages of my suicide notes and made them into armor to face whatever war may come, and yes I mean this, this is war, living is a constant struggle but I was born to do it, I wasn't born to die strung out bleeding on no sidewalk, I wasn't born to be anybody's sacrifice but I might just be somebody's martyr, I wasn't born to starve, I was born to feast, I was born to grow the sharpest fangs and use them to rip the throat of the world, grow wings a hundred feet long and use them to soar, glorious and defiant above it all, and when I tell you I found my purpose here tonight y'all I hope you can tell this is the first night my hands stopped shaking, this is the first night I've known what it means to be on fire and feel no pain,
So drink deep from the chalice of your purpose,
Go with faith towards the open gates of destiny,
Meet it wherever it may be,
And rise,
And don't ever stop rising

As a child in a church pew I would study the ceiling, anxiously looking for cracks,
My grandma would always tell me,
"The way these people act, in God's own house, is shameful,
One day He's gonna tear the roof right off this place"
I took that **** seriously,
I waited for fault lines to manifest in the stained glass, shatter, rain down shards of divinity to slice my sinful body to pieces,
I never let that feeling go, that inevitable collapse,
So when I saw it happen for real I knew that a prophecy got fulfilled that night two years ago in Orlando,
An electric heaven filled to the brim with bodies performing the act of holiness the only way they knew how,
Pressed against each other in testimony, a sacrament of blood and sweat and love that knows no forgiveness or need thereof,  
And then, the ceiling caves in just like we always knew it would,
To be young, and queer, and uncertain,
Is to be a church that is always collapsing,
A home that is always burning,
And a heart that is literally, always bleeding
We are all out here,
We are all dying inside of this machine,
By the time I knew I could be in love with another boy, he was already dead, six feet beneath Kentucky dirt and ain't nothing left in the sky after that y'all,
Nobody comes to mourn for feelings like that, I guess,
There's only so much room round here for caskets, only so much dirt left unsoiled that we can plow our sorrows into,
And what could possibly come of this, yet?
What will they bury us with when this country has devoured it's fill of us?
And, will we have a church to return to when this is over?
Somewhere bright, where our fathers can still look us in the eyes?
Somewhere everyone we've ever been afraid to love is, in their best clothes and looking to share a dance?
Somewhere the foundations shake with the force of our hymns,
Our songs, sweet and holy and entirely ours,
Rock the doors and shake the windows,
Wake the dead to come dance their pain back into living,
And the roof, y'all,
The roof there never gives in

God told me to lighten up once,
As he strode through the door savior in a white suit, gun on his hip atop a horse of fire,
I've been watching door frames ever since, because I can't convince myself that any moment no matter where I am the apocalypse won't come two stepping through here telling me it's all over and asking me if I have any regrets,
By the fact that I write this I believe it is implied that I do,
I'm throwing up over a third story balcony while you're calling me, telling me through tears that you're sorry but something got in the way,
I'm watching your tail lights as you drive off three hundred miles and blood on the pavement, and I'm thinking about how you will wake tomorrow soaked in wine and a thin layer of sweat, and I will cross myself three times lighting a cigarette off the sunrise, and I will pray for your soul like the fool I've always been,
I'm watching you laugh and I'm doing nothing of any importance, I'm just going to watch your face contort into pentagram after pentagram until I lay my head back, and wait for the devil to kiss me in my sleep
I turn to face rapture and I ask him if mercy will come along with us for the ride,
He says,
There is no us, son
There is you, and there is the night, and there is a whole **** world waiting to forget
Like every dream before, and every dream to come, this will end before you are ready

Projection, astral themes and recurring images, this is a Dream state, this is a dream state, I reach out from beyond the veil of sleep to tell you, not to cut your hair, not to come home tonight, circle the block till god cracks the concrete and rises like steam from the sidewalk, you can't follow him where he's going but you will study the creases in your palms until you become convinced that you can, find some kind of nostalgia in futility, cycles of self deception and waves of mutilation, doesn't it just break your heart to be so - much, to be so vast and endless, to swim forever and never touch the walls of the pool, stroke, stroke, drown, surface, drown, and isn't that just another defense mechanism, it isn't my fault, I can't ever see where I'm going, some day I'll come into my own here, reach the wild velocity of desire and vibrate in frequency, levitate sixty feet in the air and hold, locked in stasis, until the feeling dies, and I come down, shatter, and dissipate like so much dust, tell me, is that a star worth wishing on?