i. Syphilisation

                                        Symptoms of indecision plague them,
that populace of rock-dwelling specimens
to the crags of a fallen giant’s
heart clinging, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging beasts
crawling into silence as for once
they keep their peace, seeking this gargantuan
unkindness of a raven’s cloud clawed
to conclusion by his leonine pride, that
fire which deceived him, its surviving
                    brightness enough to guide them from their cruel

                                        lives’ subsidized stupors to climb through
the world’s selfsame denial that binds condemned
mortals to heaven, this simplest truth
we hide inside clandestine cloaks of verbose
and defiant prose our fragile minds
mistake for poems, laws inscribed not on stone
but fear’s delicate tissue petty
violence eviscerates from less-noble
bone, insensitive and persistent
                    Sibylline Oracles we ignore, until

                                        love’s unseen force burns to our core its
cure our tortured souls could have had, if we had
not been too frugal to expend this
war’s warmest effort instead in accepting
its mystic gift before, this precious
little message intercepted and obscured
by opportunistic simonists,
selling it back to us after packaging
it in bullshit and metaphysics,
                    convincing even the greatest skeptic that

                    ii. Necromanticism

                                        without its purchase we would perish,
anguished by marketing’s adepts, unaware
that what resurrects a felled Titan
is that ancient lightning we each ignite when
we question authority, and turn
inward to find the sword considered a scourge
by all governments, the Self rising
from deep within us, every one a swift
phoenix fathered by most-devious
                    Prometheus, whose execution sentence

                                        we stay whenever we malcontents
reject rhetoric regurgitated by
oppressive institutions whose wounds
inhibit speech’s free movement, and say what
inside keeps the individual
from being consumed by syphilisation’s
ruinous ride, from conflict’s ashen
conflagration, embracing that mischievous
necromanticism for which we black
                    magicians of the fringes are so well-known—

                                        infamous, even—that dark power
with which miracles from mountains are hewn, words
removing from rejection’s cold walls
every stone, until doing what should have
been done restores to its ancestral
home, this spirit that makes our flesh prisons for
something more, both divine and human,
something eternal that, in its impure and
unexpurgated form, speaks to sin’s
                    ability to transcend Hell’s condition.