Month: July 2026

The cantor folds the psalter’s sacred page,
The acolyte clears the dust from empty stage. 
I too must go, prepared, without a word, 
A stranger stepping past this darkened world. 

And shaking off the dust of mortal clay, 
I journey through the stars, and drift away.

My love resounds through stars, shall not decay. 

After sunset, the burden gathers weight,
as crows descend through corridors of twilight.
Claw or hand pries open the Moon’s gate—
for you, my friend, I’ve turned to ghostlight.
I fell in silence from the phosphor-lit sky;
when you leaned closer, nothing did I say:
“Do you still keep a dream of me on high…?
Is there a breath that has not slipped away?”
And on the third night, if candles scorch my sight,
is it the rising or the road of lament?
For I am but a tool, a broken mirror of light,
serving — ut omnes per illum crederent.

If I must fall, then let it be with grace,
to sign my name within the Book of the Dead.
I sought for God in every glass’s trace,
to sip the silence, taste the hush it shed.
In living tears, beneath my fleeting breath,
my scattered hopes lie broken, crushed and small.
Silence descends; my body leans to death,
a vast sign rises on the midnight wall.
No zodiac shines there; half-dead we remain,
and even at matins we watch no more.
Our souls burn down, then gutter and wane,
blessed into silence with each glass I pour.

And those whom fate has summoned to depart
present to me the last waltz of the ball.
Spirits keep turning with moonlight in their heart:
so life grows colder — each generation’s fall.
The gleam of my signet-ring flickers, then fades;
the warders within me sink into rest.
The last of the line, among funereal shades—
“et lux in tenebris,” so often confessed.
They say that a star lights the brow of our dust,
the flash of our consciousness shall never cease;
yet all that is falls, and all that was, dust—
bodies fall earthward, their throats given no release.

One final dance I ask, within this stillness,
one final glass of wine I’ll share with you.
So, when I leave, they may say I was smiling,
my lover was summer, and winter I knew.
And all whom I wronged forgave me in kindness,
with falling leaves my body takes flight —
I turn back again and toast to the heavens,
a farewell blessing beneath the sun’s light.

The café holds its silence, teacups in the twilight’s glow,
lengthy shadows gather as the sinking daylight goes.
The evening melts like newsprint, blurred and bleeding in the rain,
as I call you closer, life congeals in a fragile frame.

I hear your heartbeat pulsing through the bitter-bellied night,
silence coils like acid, void of surrender or light.
Above, the teacups rattle, spoons like tongues of bells that toll,
tablecloths lie frozen, canvas of the parting soul.

I knew if you drew nearer, blades would cut from throat to chin,
your jawline carved against me, silence searing deep within.
Our house becomes a photo—void of present, void of dawn,
no future inked inside it, nor today to lean upon.
Just a canvas made of flesh, stripped of breath and any sign,
beloved, wordless silence curdling into slow decline—
a painting made of flesh in well-loved solemn silence shone
the death-cry of the seeds that strike the stone, unlived, unsown

Weeping as he empties the chalice of his solitude,
the strayer blindly gallops through the twilight as it broods.
He casts a mask on jawbones, visage grim and starkly bare,
he learns from plaster, flesh, and dust the truths that linger there.
Through sugar-brown horizons, his hand splits evening’s brittle seam,
he barters fractured hours for the ash of broken gleam.
He buries heaven in soil, the Moon inside the setting Sun—
resurrection into ruin, damnation slowly comes undone.

And should they persuade him, “There lie horizons yet to be,”
silently he answers, “I wait—yet nothing comes to me.
For she burned all bridges, left their ashes to the air,
laying every living hope beneath horizons bare.

If brighter days still dawn, I turn away from light,
for I was always last—the shadow out of sight.
And so the end has come, the place I called my own:
the path I walked alone, the grave that I have sown.”

You never beheld the thing I became,
that night you withdrew to your curtained domain.
Only the cracks in the ceiling that bled,
only the chalice that shattered instead,
the wine like a river, a crimson rain,
the end of the night in silence and pain—
only the shadows could speak to your ear,
my voice was a whisper you refused to hear.

And you never saw the tears in the night,
the veil of the darkness concealed me from sight.
Alone with myself in a hollow domain,
as the castle of silence fell on my pain.
Its wings of stillness beat heavy, unheard,
like beasts in arenas that tear saints to dirt.
The chandeliers darkened, their brilliance withdrawn,
their crystal light broken, forever gone.

You never beheld the fire I became,
you pinched out that fire — a flickering flame.
You crushed my soul in your soul’s ashtray,
fed me the fate that you tossed away.
The verdict we forged turned rotten on our lips,
your misshapen creation you shattered to bits.
A teacher of ruin, you gnawed at my core,
and still you kept chewing and hungered for more.

You never beheld the thing I became,
the curtains fell shut, and the darkness laid claim.
And quietly, hidden behind their embrace,
you smothered yourself in that silent space.

Martyrs ignite in the closets they keep,
saints are torn apart where monuments weep.

The night of teeth is closing, a jaw that swallows whole, 
the ships return beyond the pier, into the speechless shore.
Your body crashes downward, dragged by your soul’s wild flesh,
as God’s stone garden shatters, collapsing into ash.

I waited in the windows, their shutters open wide,
I tore whole lands asunder, from earth and from my side.
I stood with you in silence, when from your cheek you tore
the skin down to the jawbone, God’s image ripped and raw.

And I smiled inside your fire,
loved you like the lone survivor,
one who’s lost all else before,
yet loves even more.

You scratched my wounds wide open, and dragged the Moon to rest,
a trinket on your bosom, a toy upon your chest.
You turned into God’s coroner, dissecting all I hold,
my soul laid out in silence, its secrets growing cold.

And as the midnight severed, and split our bond in two,
you tied the trembling vessels, the lifeblood flowing through.
The gardens died within me, their roots consumed by rust,
the evergreen surrendered and smoldered into dust.

And so, the night of teeth has closed, a silence pounding hollow,
within my chest an ageless drum, too wordless still to follow.
If I am led to vanish now, I go without your flame,
yet carry burning images, forever marked with pain.

I grew into your sharpened nails, our cellar soul enfolding,
became in you what you in me, a shadowed self-beholding.
And as I fall I’ll visit you once more before we part,
to place you in the North Star’s hands, its everlasting heart.

The Northern Star was watching, a beacon by the side,
it marked the lane of dying with its cold and sleepless light.
It came to me at vigil, in whispers sharp and frail:
“What once was bound together shall never be unveiled.”

It promised when I landed the gardens will arise,
for rivers always find each other where their delta lies.
The orphans at the table embrace through tears and song,
and those once lost to death return, where they do belong.

Light a candle in the cathedral green,
for the gargoyle I’ve transformed within—
matter only, bloodless cast,
quia nomen habes quod vivas –
et mortuus est.

Should I exalt the ruler-straightened silence,
the cracking fall of temples as they cave?
Praise God who robbed me, beat me into violence,
give thanks for charnel stench, the rot I crave?

Collapse in dust, beneath this crushing lonely,
psalming with screams upon His barbed-hook line,
within a city frozen, lifeless and holy,
where watchful zealots perch on nothing’s spine.

Then only dread the slow decay while breathing,
when votive flames in cathedrals gutter out,
and stained-glass roses bleed their embers, seething—
the saints crawl forth, their scorched limbs twist about.

They twine their fingers tight into my sinew,
the living bells gaze down the drowning ledge,
a step, a slip, and I shall fall within you—
peace or a coffin’s marble past the edge.

For what could wait that’s crueler, more horrendous?
I call your name, but you have gone too far.
“Gloria in excelsis” rings pretentious—
a clapper’s lash, a tongue that splits to scar.

Each nightfall strikes me down in dream’s derision,
half-dead I sprawl across the kneeling floor;
“memento vitae” whisper in collision—
head-first in God’s cold pincers evermore.

I have come to know the ones who walk away,
I have wept for those whose steps have gone astray.
In the rolling quiet our sentences turn cold,
clothed in pale grief, too fragile to behold.

At those times I longed to be an altar’s sheet,
blood-stained rag that I laid out beneath your feet,
so I could become for you the one I am,
but now all is ended — Good Friday seals my hand.

Crosses in our hands, we drink our grief away,
headlong will we fall into the doomsday fray.
What once was returns, what never was conspires,
a bullet’s burning kiss, the spittle of the fly.

As the final glow fades slowly from our sight,
the crafted temple arch collapses in the night.
You’ll be filled alone, yet I am cast away,
the branches may vanish, the fire’s left to stay.

Cast aside I stand, a jester far too small,
a woeful stain upon the weeping skyey wall.
Skylines in my hand, I release you in pain,
I entomb you still and mourn you once again.

Like all the rest, you too will learn to forget,
when spring sets in with hail and thawing wet.
You’ll trickle from my face, from parchment night,
while all the world laughs green and bursts with light.

Vanitas vanitatum dixit Ecclesiastes,
Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.

You won’t recall the solitude we shared,
how heaven’s buttressed ramparts split and bared;
we were the breadth of splintering creation,
we were awareness and a burning oblation.

Upon God’s altar lay the fractured host,
one substance in two bodies, darkening to ghost;
with fingers interlaced we burned, hand into hand,
I scarred myself to you—we two were one, one brand.

A masquerade within the halls of God;
snow drifts on us, our buckling shoulders nod.
Winter again; the stroke of midnight’s dread—
upon this earth, the ghosts go forth and tread.

In the blackened silence do I learn to see,
The stigma marked on sleepless foreheads deep,
A brimming cup of life pours down on me,
We drift through velvet in the night’s dark sweep.

Betrayed at dawn by weeping, golden light,
In holy-painted fields we lost our way,
And angels tread the frost on plains of white,
Where fate’s dim shimmer rises into day.

Exile entwines us, binding chain to chain,
In strangers’ temples we are the cornerstone,
Unworthy still of mercy for our pain—
Tears are the gift of pure and brave alone.

At last, within each other’s solitude,
At last, with blood, we seal our interlude.