i.

Weathering the veins, decaying shades of grey
make haste to lay waste to everything
on their way to the heart’s patient
place, shaking habits like fists at it,
the body’s tributaries take sin’s temptations for
a ride, not for granted, lift from
those abecedarian ashes a taste of another
life’s fading brightness, every scrap of illuminated
parchment’s charred flesh the lacuna of a
shredded monk’s manuscript, fragments of ancient secrets
scrapped like the relics of nameless saints

                    ii.

relegated by the indifference of conquest to
some Byzantine trash-heap, scraped like paint from
waiting pages, a lost age’s fading images
strongarmed by some illiterate degenerate’s petty theft,
a raging mess filling up with their
gaps what feast of piecemeal knowledge splinters
through the cracks and crevices of locked
cabinets, enlightens them by transference, fueling the
curious, a digest of digressions dancing to
an irreligious end, famished pilgrims in an
unholy land, interrogative as Grand Inquisitors as

                    iii.

evidence of their whispers, those banned treatises
of heretic philosophers, part from their gilded
bindings and scissor in, scraps of paper
eaten like Ezekiel’s prophecy, contaminated codices pointing
the fingers of their calligraphy’s many manicured
manicules at the walls of arteries they
clog, eating the alphabet martyrs ungentle men
unfamiliar, and ill-equipped, with too little tongue
and more-than-enough lip to get it, that
this debris is the flotsam jettisoned by
heaven, what these fiends have been swallowing

                    iv.

is the come of fallen angels, turning
to inconsolable dust the uncontrollable lust of
the desolate, coiled ropes of scrolls eaten
like the unfurling rosebuds of virgins’ excited
assholes by hedonists falling for immortals, in
the devious capriciousness of their carelessness turning
from household gods to words with too
many syllables to handle, paying no attention,
praying without intention, hoping for a miracle
in the margins of another hand’s ritual,
subverting the cursive rubric with animal fervour,

                    v.

ravenous brutes whetting the ill-repute of their
collective stupor with reddened teeth bearing down
now on raw marrow no one will
know about tomorrow, hunger turning to shit
what was once too sacred to shout
so it had to be written out,
what those thieves eat whenever they speak
are beliefs they never gave an opportunity
to seek them, for faith works to
find us and if it does we
need to feed it or it r(i)ots.