Deviants & Divine
He strips the skin from his knuckles on raw flagstone,
grinding bone to a paste until the wet, yellow fat
of his own marrow waxes the floor -
a glistening, tallow offering to an unblinking dome of copper heat.
His stomach is a cured leather pouch dried tight around his spine.
He starves the meat from his ribs,
hollowing his chest into a sounding board for the divine.
When the ecstasy rips through him,
his eyes roll upward into darkness,
leaving only the blood-shot, weeping whites exposed -
a rabid hound choking out its last breath on a taut iron chain.
Inside the vault of his skull,
the song of seraphim sounds like jagged iron tearing through iron.
He retches black, bile-soaked rot into a chalice of beaten silver.
The bishop wipes the prophet’s chin with silk.
The king drops to his knees to press his lips against his blackening, gangrenous flesh.
And the odor of his putrefying gums
is breathed in by the devout, named the sweet scent of sanctity.
She jams her nails beneath her collarbone,
tearing through skin and fascia to wrench
the white-hot wire from her sternum.
Twenty days without bread;
she is starving the opacity out of her blood,
trying to turn her ribs to quartz,
so the shadows can pass through her flesh without leaving a stain.
Her knees are ruptured, weeping purple sacks of pus
from weeks glued to the linoleum,
imploring the buzzing fluorescent tube overhead
to stop humming the names of her drowned children.
When the revelation snaps her spine backward,
her jaw unhinges with an audible crack -
the same violent, lightning-struck arc,
the same blinding, white rupture behind her eyes.
She bites through her own lower lip,
spitting hot crimson across the floor
in a desperate attempt to speak the tongue of the sun.
They slam fifty milligrams into her thigh.
They winch her wrists into leather cuffs
until the frantic barking of her pulse goes quiet.
A single stroke of blue ballpoint ink across
a chart cauterizes the vision behind her eyes.
Strip the stained linen gown from the martyr.
Tear the canvas smock from the lunatic.
Scrape the dried holy water and the cold,
padded-cell sweat from their ribs.
Both kneel in their own rotting fluids.
Both scream until the tongue splits down the center.
There is no holy land, nor asylum.
There is only the obsession,
and the poor, bleeding animal
trapped inside it.
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