The Judas Scroll

The Judas Scroll Sometimes the night is laden with guilt. The nails curse me. The mob applauds like children scrambling for the safety of their lies. Your eyes curse me, follow me to hell, hold you to a lie that never lets go. You, out of the night, trapped and free. A twin edged dream of glory with twelve foundations, always staying outside the bones of life, preferring the ghosts of things past. Take this mystery, the body and the blood, for ignorance. The priests have prayed everything away, hiding your face, your Words, but not the keys. From the heart of their denial, they built walls, discarded your brain and learned from riddles, pure rules for the ages, yet that didn’t save your hands, your eyes. Nothing will last but your heart. Always after you slept, you ignored the visions stalled near the cluttered mornings. When you were near these fragments and heard the clap of history, you heard it as different sounds. No man could shake these notions. A place without end or beginning. Nor could it avoid the dream that survived from sleep, a ghost from the cosmos calmly walking through stone, soaring over our minds, a true sadness blowing out of the past. Sometimes when you’re tired of this, take your bones, gather in the whim of gypsies and throw different dice from different hands. Take fate, the planets, pure chance. A new skin primarily. Change everything. Take your luck and mine. Change everything. On firmer ground, you could climb or sing, or follow the raging wind. Yet here you lie in an uncovered grave, what riddle can we make of that? Spend your heart, you can replace that. Use your tongue as a sword, Destroying what is different in all of us. Spend your eyes. Curse me once. Spend your dreams and your songs. Run like the wind, like the night. Hide from the beginning and the end. This is the hell you said we’d never see. Hide from the sound of my voice, the sight of my eyes. Forget the sheep. They will only remember the riddles, Not your laugh and your heart. But You wouldn’t listen, and I could not stop. The earth trembled in our hands. History spun on a cross and fed on your carcass. Yet, it did not free my soul. Somehow you ended inside me. I was you dying. My blood spilled with your blood. My flesh rotted with your flesh. Outside, snow white mountains blackened the earth. Flowers died, deserted the gardens, dissolved the rivers. A brittle skeleton the ended ignobly, vulgar and condemned. Mark Conte, CCC, 1986