Making the Same Mistakes (My Soul Searches for Me)

                         i.

Two authorless manuscripts, orthodox
unto ourselves, downed prophets who
pronounce the books of the zodiac, how
history happens forwards, but

is written backwards, and read in a cracked
mirror, telling us, now fallen,
sculpted in marble, soft as flesh and cold
as death, clothed with Adam’s body,

prophets deserve parody, the way grey
Catholicism settles on us,
its apostates, like dust visible and
invisible in some places,

and in some places not, the way
impious sacrifice makes a

                         ii.

name heretical, first unwritable,
then unsayable, and then one
unthinkable, total erasure not
possible with four gospels as

witnesses to all my evil’s troubles,
cast from above as examples
of what not to allow those you go down
on to model, no matter how

low the blow or high the brow, our moral
should ever be this to follow:
never spit more vitriol than you know
you will swallow, unfurrow now

your beaten brow, sweating out what shadow
crawls brothel walls without sorrow.