[…]I will come to you soon
                              and make war against them
                                        with the sword of my mouth.
                                                            —Rev 2:16¹

                    ⁂

Sometimes god happens fast, illuminating

life’s manuscript before shadows can
pass over it, before voyeurs with scarlet-
scarred eyes can eclipse all morals, cross

the rubric’s line warning against defying
divine timing, and trespass hard our
highest definition of boundaries blurred

by attrition, glances of serpents
stripping to skeletons flesh the nude fragrance
of innocence once anointed but

washes over no longer, a rape of locks
returning us to savage kingdoms,
our raging fight against being average

a taxing battle, taking from us
what strength shame hides under midnight’s cover of
figurative leaves no more, heaven’s

hands scattering clouds of strife with digital
artifacts of one voice’s epic
breath, fingers ambitious and ambidextrous,

a litany of fists thundering
in, rolling from the east and the west, the right
and the left, punching out stars whose sparks

falling to earth the sky honours with a code

                                        ⁂

of Morse, storms filling in our lies with

flaming tongues of light, terrifying gold’s shine
into believing wealth’s piercing need
to be noticed, to be brightest, is a myth—

its uncompromising promise of
constant comfort an illusion, a purchase
in truth worthless and without substance,

a chemical pursuit that always ends in
the perilous marriage of the soul
to its own perpetual oblivion,

an objective the defense of which
is without precedent, not an instance or
inch of any long-established or concealed

wisdom to call on and quote in those
moments the furnace of righteousness
tries them, sin burning out its adherents, those

rarest gems’ allegedly precious
bones exposed as only mortal once broken,
pieces of princes peerless as grains

of vagrant sand, fading dust racing nameless
and aimlessly around an hourglass,
commoner than dirt when stripped of their armour,

angels useless as crushed insects when

                                                            ⁂

reduced by fact to fable, scared characters

prejudiced against accepting they
are not real, and nowhere near valuable,
but the wound of truth is one silence

rarely heals, sometimes heated exchange kills us
or its remedy clears the air of
unclean spirits we refuse to acknowledge

are always there, enemy legions
and anathema schemas of demons some
unforeseen argument releases

from eating the seeds of our very being
from deep within our core, god throwing
face-first into the orchard of this world fruit

withering under the weight of all
his crown’s knowing, crawling out of hiding and
willing to show his children they will

never win, sending Saturn to devour them
who fail to learn their lesson, his heirs
spared the beast if only we would open our

mouths and offer up our hearts instead,
trusting that what words pour out of us are his
and not our own, which imprison one

as fast as wit flees brilliance, stealing the show.

__________
¹“The Revelation to Saint John,” Chapter 2, Verse 16, from “The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ: New Revised Standard Version” in The Holy Bible: containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books: New Revised Standard Version, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989; page 267.