Issuu

Acknowledgements

This body of work would not have been made possible if it were not for the tireless efforts of the Catholic Church and its progeny, as well as the socioeconomic, political, and familial institutions to which we are choicelessly bound.

May you burn in the hell you created

“Iamnotyourpreacher…”

Meditation on Laicization

I’ve spent my life ripping pounds of arterial webbing from my own stomach and handing it over to any who asked, unquestioningly. I have watched my own blood trickle down the shower drain as a holy stream of life, disseminating to those I hold on Atlas shoulders, rather than back into my own vena cava. I walk on broken bones to offer absolution to the dreck of what is available to humanity; wretched forms come to me for the promise of salvation—an army of bent bodies and choir of hollow, melancholic moans found me the moment that I was sprung from one one such being, and stolen by another That intimate moment where I took my first earthly breath was the very one where I learned that I was tied to a substance I never chose. I was watered in the womb with pesticides, born to sow absolution for those who do not deserve it—such absolution comes at a grave price, but not to those who reap the spoils.

They come to me for deliverance and steal the holiest parts of me. I can feel myself becoming made in their image as I watch them cannibalize a being that they claim to love. Their sins are washed away in my blood and their teeth are sharpened on my bones so that they can use them to back me into a corner and demand more. Their arms trained so perfectly to find holes that they’ve already made before they tear another still-breathing organ from my torso to feed on. Their fat fingers reach in between my ribs and crack them from my body as they desperately search for the most tender pieces of meat. Raw slices of me hang from their lips as they wipe their sweat and my blood from their brow—it’s tiring work for them. My femur hangs in a butcher shop for those who are unable to find me when they need. They come in crowds, and they come alone. They come while I sleep, waking me with the sound of their stomachs louder than any war drum that could lead a monster to conquest. There is no respite from the rattling of the slowly-cracking glass as their elbows tear away on the splintered sill.

How could you still be hungry?

I’ve buried what’s left of this still-living corpse and stuffed my liver with mold in an attempt to regrow. A tangled mess of nerves and veins that we, together,

exposed one by one were stitched back into their original form by the spiders I paid off with the maggots that crawl from my eyes. I find commune with the monsters whom I have found. The cryptids left in the woods that used to carry my once warm body into my hovel when I stayed too long, drunk on the rancid juice that drips from the rancid fruit all around me. The grass is growing brown now, and the rats that I rely on have themselves been killed off by my needs. My own rotting flesh poisoning the ground from which their food and water must come. Now, they bite. What’s left of them deliver not nutrition but disease-ridden inoculations that I cannot rid myself of. I have filled my skull with bleach to degerminate the roots they grew there, but it kills what is left of me.

Why is this what your god demands?

I can hear them drawing ever nearer as I struggle to carry myself to my next breath. Fresh meats, vegetables, and wines await them in their homes. I have made feasts beyond that which one could fathom. I slaughtered the veal in my own home, I built the vineyard and grew the vines from the chunks of my heart that I buried for good. My dearest pets, my closest friends, my most precious items, I have given or killed for relief. They love to hear me beg. They love to watch me lose what I have left. My body laid writhing, I’m reminded that the scriptures say I’m only art when I bleed—when I shove my hands into my wounds in a last attempt to console myself, to slow the bleeding, to feel divinity. It only works for a moment. It tastes so good coming off of my fingers. A sweet metallic whiskey one shouldn’t dare hand away, laid onto a roulette table for simple pleasures. They do not listen. They do not care.

Godless, they say.

I should be thankful that I was the one they chose to sustain them. I should be grateful that I am not forced to subsist on another’s body. How could I withhold such sweet salvation? Their communion is the cornerstone of their lives—the only thing that can keep them living. I am a high priest of the One True God and I should hold myself as such. How will I explain the way that I have failed my flock to Saint Peter? I owe so much to the congregation that gave me my genesis and allows

so graciously for me to stay within their walls. Wheat grows despite famine, animals thrive beyond their weight. What is it of me to take away their blessings which allow such abundance? Abundance that inspires hope for the future. Something to look upon and think of a world where they do not have to bite from me.

I have left all of my own food on their doorsteps, begging them to stop. It remains there until it rots for the vermin to take for themselves. I remain but a withering corpse of breathing skeletal remains. Everything I have, I have given to them in a last attempt to beg for their mercy. They have seen through my beating carcass as I slouch from their homes. I have given everything I have. I am but bones held together now. I have given everything I have. There is nothing left to eat. I have given everything I have. What are you going to reach for now? I have given everything I have. My body has rotten away and my skull contains but bitter broth that leaks from my eyes. I have given everything I have. I have already given everything I have.

“I’mnotdyingtogettoheaven…”

Autolatry as the practice of a Heretic —

A trinity of the ruins of the damned stands in the center of a hill where sound can’t escape. Seraphim scream in the periphery of a cardinal stake of honor—kept empty as a reminder to me and me alone of what would be to come if I were able to count the cards that I had been dealt. Deniers of the Most High are to be lit so brightly that He may see His veneration so gloriously inflamed. This is the only thing they will stay silent for. The only thing that will stop their clawing at my forearms for a moment’s time. They stand, motionless and transfixed, blind to the rest of the world around them as the flesh and meat burns away from their compatriots and the smell of a burning animal permeates their densely packed crowd for everyone to enjoy. A horrifying concert of wails echoes through the trees that were used to ignite their fate. This is the only music that they allow The only music that they enjoy. It seems to last beyond the lifespan of vocal chords in such a condition. Even from my own home I choke on and spit out the soot and ashes that the wind carries to me.

My own ability to speak ceases before their duet. This innate ability to persist in pain is a talent we share—but unfathomable to witness nonetheless. They are stolen from their homes at all hours of the night by those they held close. The beings that they thought would keep them safe, that they, too, had accompanied to collect the contemptible souls that were taken before them. That is when the screaming starts. Harmonies from separate homes pierce through the woods to penetrate the peace of all those on the grounds. They are bound at the feet with chains forged in the metals my blood leaves in the ground, their knees and elbows connected by rope twisted from the cords that hang the church bells in towers that announce their actions. Their fingers are broken and braided together in front of their bodies, held in one final prayer—no last rites are read. They are force fed bittersweet paralytics from cherry seeds and fallen apples—not so they are vacated from their pain, but so that they do not interrupt the process. Thrown to the floor and hastily lifted by cracking frames out their front door and through the

grounds, the beat of the footsteps of the mob the only mantra to hold onto for a last moment of peace before flame.

Once they reach their destination they are hoisted onto a platform—still able to stand, though just barely—their arms are pulled over their discheviled head and behind them, wenched on a scarecrow’s skeleton. Nearly a cross, they had the same compulsion as Saint Peter: an altered version of the passion’s tool so as not to equate one’s own death to that of the Holy Only, they knew better than he—an upside down cross would have killed him faster. They knew to avoid such trivializations. Their bodies hinge on their elbows as their bound legs are broken and they go limp—a contorted posture serving as iconography for humiliation and desolation for the sake of glorification of their Heavenly Father. Blood slowly seeps from their robes. “Holy, Holy, Holy!” Torches are passed silently from the back of the crowd to the clergy, the only illumination save for the candles inside the church barely visible from the mound through the stained glass, their bodies the only thing burning bright enough to make the temple visible. .

The first layer of skin is naturally the first to peel away in the first minutes that they bear witness to His glory. Fat begins to leak through the denser set of protective tissue and their screams become more brash as the smoke reaches their lungs. A hopeless vocal distortion. their muscles contract, contorting them into a fetal position, still hanging from their arms. As their flesh becomes dried and unglued from their skeletons, we are better able to witness their interior—I thought everyone was supposed to be more beautiful there. Decomposition from the sheer heat of the flame races cremation as the organs begin to wither and die. Hearts stop beating, lungs cease compression. Everything that once beat so surely now shrivels and withers away.

One final echo. They say it’s one of the worst ways to die. I would believe them if I could ever internalize that the end of one’s own life could be a threatening thing. I wish I could understand the fear in their eyes as they are dragged to their final moments and their arms tied behind their head. I know how it feels to be afraid of their lust for

pain and that which they inflict. I want to be afraid of the end of my suffering. Formerly I was able to microdose this fear. I thought I could feel what I needed if I ripped myself apart like they did. If I could feel how it felt to tear so viciously, maybe then I could understand. There was no way to end the torment, I tried to bring unto myself pain and glory in worship. I baptized myself in my own capillary bleeding and only then did I ever feel holy.

A filthy bastardization of freedom I created—I lived only in cyclical hurricanes of their pain and mine. An orgy solely of my own suffering for them to drink—and they only became drunker when I served it myself. I am not afraid of any pain now I am not afraid for it to end—only that I too will no longer have moments of such sweetness. I will happily burn. There has been reserved for me a most unique spot in the center of their sacrificial altar—the holy center around which an infinite series of fabricated Gestas burns. Taunting me for my inability to save and the futility of my own hope. Penitent thieves beg for holy mercy from whoever will listen.

I’ve seen it and I’ve felt it. I’ve crawled between the masses and stood in second-hand flames just to try to feel what they did—what I should, what I deserve, what I crave. It is not new to me. I must burn. I must feel the glory of sweet disavowal. I, too, can be made holy I will burn myself not with the flame that has already proven inadequate but with the fire that I set to the fabric that holds this place together. I will be remade in the glory of my own form should they choose to come for me. They burned the heretics to glorify their Lord but it only created a living reminder of who truly is holy. The only ontology are the beings flying around the center pire on wings of flame screaming for salvation. “Holy. Holy. Holy.”

I am the only holy being to which sacrifices should be made.

I am the determinant of divinity.

False idolatry and misdirected worship were always the highest of crimes in their eyes—one they’d been committing in such volumes so as to drown out the old gods that they’d kept caged beneath their churches. Have you met your prisoner? Is that the reason why you move forward with such conviction? I think you know how

evil you are—waving a banner of hollow divine promises perverted to consecrate your own fleshly decadence. Deniability died with the trees that you used to construct your monasteries. I stand at the center of heretical arrogance and only then do I understand how one could be moved to feel divinity. You will pray to me and me alone.

“I’mtheArchangelthatsavedme, I’veforsakenyourname

”

The Price of a Lost Soul is Marked as Three Centesimi

to Mark the Vileness of the Work —

Their declarations of other bodies as unworthy of the life that they steal from myself and those around them fell to me. I guided the damned to their final moments—they would meet their end at the bottom of a tangle of twine, with threads made from my hair For something as simple as a sinful breath they would call for my service. These were not the Heretics they feared so deeply. These were people who must steal my leftovers from others because they cannot obtain it themselves. The people who laid with those of their own kind. The people who were cursed with empathetic desire to assist their fellow man in ways that the Lord had not yet outlawed. Not even in their warped consciousness did my most unfortunate victims pose a threat—mere disorder

Their call for the end would be sure to make me aware that my payment would reflect the work that I was doing— it’s a vile thing, to take a life. They threw their coins at me as I walked away from the crowd. I trod forward, letting them pelt me with silver and watching it fall to the ground. I deserved and craved nothing less than what I was providing—forcing upon—the innocent, not payment for a job that I never agreed to. The memories of my actions are held in my tendons so tightly that they could move themselves independently of my will to carry out a holy man's bidding. The individuals who I left gagging on their own blood as I tried my damndest to make their fate a quick one sing me to sleep. Any tool I could use was inadequate to hasten their suffering. The wardens love the pain. Vile work indeed.

If ever I’d believed in everlasting life it was in the moments where I watched it drain from the eyes of innocents. In their final breaths I could hear them whisper my name—one I’d long forgotten, a sweet exsanguination reminding me of my holy roots—and their cold breath held a crystallization of themselves that lives in the crevice that eroded through my brain. The bodies remain hanging outside of my window until the vultures and ravens rip them apart and bring their eyes to me to

taunt me for what I have done. They are out of my reach. I have tried to cut them down. I have dug empty graves for them with full intention to bury them in the ways that they wished they were awarded. Instead I break my knees and exhaust my chest jumping to try to cut them down.

But beaten dogs bite back. May the murders that I have committed at the directive of your priests guide me in my pursuit of my own peace. Their prayers will fall on the ears of archangels who have long fled their posts. The rats you’ve forgotten to feed will eat your Christ figure alive. Saint Peter will not be there to welcome you to the gates; he will be hanging by your side. I have stared into Gabriel’s horn and poured acid into its bell, burned his throat and lungs so that he cannot call to arms any holy soldier that may remain. I have retailored divine armor, desecrated the last remnants of what you keep to keep you safe. I am the only Hosea coming to bring salvation and redemption from your most intimate idyllic transgressions. I will ransom again only myself from the power of the grave; I will redeem only myself from death. O death, I will be thy plagues; O graves, I will be thy destruction: repentance shall not be hid from mine eyes but forced upon you when you swallow the dirt from whence you came. Ashes to ashes, you said.

Divinity was only ever found in brutal violence. Let not mercy and truth forsake you; bind them to your neck. Very near to the base of one’s skull we fasten the tightest part of the noose—and a merciful practitioner will find the ideal length for the size of the soul. A short-drop execution guarantees the closure of a convict’s carotid artery—preventing oxygen’s path to the brain. They choke. They kick. They try to pull themselves up if they are able. Then, the Closure of the jugular vein—the heart cannot receive blood from the body. Stillness. However, long-drop executions are a separate piece of hell on Earth. The neck cannot withhold the weight of the body as its speed impacts with the abrupt stop of the rope. These bodies I was always able to bury, even if it was in pieces. The Ideal Hangman’s Fracture consists of two markers. The aim is to cause a bilateral fracture compromising the part of the bone that is responsible for the constitution of spine and nervous system on the

second-to-nearest vertebrae to the skull. From there, it will separate from its inferior neighbor. Instant. Painless. You will trust with your last breath a pine structure and a rope that I will be sure is too short for your weight. Holding in my hand the rope that I know you will hang from feels like seeing my life come to me from the ether again. You’ll look so pretty in this necklace I made for you—I deserve your pain! How does it feel to cause such anguish free of consequence? How does it feel to see so plainly the desolation that you cause to another living soul, supposedly made in exactly the image of You? I want to hear the moans of those that deserve the agony. How sweet did it sound to you? I know impulse, but not like this. My darling, I had forgotten what you sounded like, bound by your faith like blocks of concrete to your feet in the acerbic river you drink from. Vile.

” 19

“Theonlyhonoryouwillhaveistodieinmyname

The Churchyards Lay Vacant —

What is tradition when there is nobody to watch? Would you still have eaten away at me if there was nobody to see you consume something more suitable? What is ritual when the being to whom you sacrifice is dead? That was yours, never mine. I never cared much for your source of divinity, a slouching beast of a savior that claims omnibenevolence affronting the fact that I see with my own eyes the destruction that He has caused first hand to be carried out. How could anyone cry at the sight of such a beautiful harvest? Seeds sown in souls bought, sold, and inevitably stolen for my own feeding. Tradition never fed me, but I’ve never been this full. Get off the fucking ground if you’re all-powerful. Show me what omnipotence really means. I’m laughing now—breathing for the first time—and inhaling the vacuous mist leaving your noses. Intoxicating sulfuric remnants of—not quite a soul, but something else. Limp forms swinging together in a disjointed pattern, as if the wind didn’t know what to do with them. The impact of their bodies colliding probably would have caused bruising, but I’m not worried about the state of their bodies, and am not inclined to believe that internal bleeding would be possible for any stretch of time postmortem. Cries ring in my skull reminding me how important ritual has always been. We would not be here without those who came before us leading us into the Glory that we are able to enjoy so easily today. The honor that we are guaranteed at the time of our death is the only thing preventing us from reaching it prematurely. The eucharist taken so solemnly by those queued in front of us reminds us why we survive. There is no reality that exists outside the framework that was forced down my throat—I have to make my own. The priests that wrote the holy text wrote it to their own benefit. They wrote room for their own gluttony, greed, and condemnations of all others who may prove to be inconvenient to them. The graveyards you had planned to be buried in are mired with the sin of those who built them, the stones made of the holy bones carved and reconstituted for your memoriam. Their intimate remains were to bear your name—theirs to be forgotten.

Ritual is merely the effort of the dead to venerate themselves and the mirrored hope of the living that they too will be so honored. The writers of the procedures we followed now swing alongside those they sacrificed ultimately to themselves. They raised a shining banner bearing another’s name, offering sacrifices not from faith but from self-righteous preservation—a hope that one day, they will be thought of while others watch the ones they used to have reason to love suffer You ate from me because you liked the taste. You watched the wheat grow and the animals gain weight, and still you twisted my intestines around your knuckles and gnawed until you couldn’t eat any more without the eruption of the only being that you could never think to harm—yourself. What a tradition of abundance, one that decimates the only source from which you may receive such salvation. Cain never conceived such selfish action. Tradition will not call you home when there is no home or ancestral soul to bear its weight on you. Ritual will not hold you in its arms as you hope your offspring will in your final moments.

Your children will not be near on the day you are buried. They have gone far enough to outrun the sonic echoes of your wails. They knew—they hoped, I even think I heard a prayer—that this was coming and they themselves dreamed of living behind my eyes when it did. How could you not sleep in a bed you made so nicely? You brought upon yourself the erasure of your name and the rejection of remembrance that will befall your soul. I will ask no father for forgiveness. There no longer exists any divine power for you to venerate, there remains no parishioner for whom I must provide holy deliverance, there is no Priest for my solemn choir to outsing. Even still, I wouldn’t have to listen to his Homily anymore if there were. I can throw him into the makeshift graveyard that I made out of the grounds of a poisoned field while the Churchyard lays empty, bare of any body to honor.

You stared beyond the gates to the graveyard as a child and somehow knew you would never end up there. You thought yourself a god, you thought yourself omnipotent, undying, eternal. A child’s naïevitie or a prophetic devotion that only had truthful fortunes when you looked to it for your own final rest. Where will you end up? Empty graves lay open and waiting. The magnum opera of engravings

carved by hand into stones that you commissioned to bear your bitter name draped in honey will chip away with the acid rain that falls over everything Glory touches first. You will be left to lay near the banks of the river I was captive to drink from. For the first time I will feel nothing as I look to your rotting bodies nourishing the ground I will continue to walk upon.

“IfI'mowedapoundofflesh, I’lltakeitonlyfrommyself

”

Confessional

I want to hold you so tenderly in my hands that you forget what it’s like to experience the feeling of pain. The thought that it could have ever been me to inflict such suffering is killing me before I believe I’ll get the chance to try. The destruction that I reigned was for my benefit. To keep myself alive. What fucking selfish creature could think that one person’s liberation could be worth the decimation of entire families—the circumstances of their demise be damned. Utilitarian number games run through my head as I count the bodies I willingly piled for my own satiation. Ones whose claws scraped through my clothing and screams shattered my ear drums. Ones who ripped those I loved limb from limb for minor transgressions one wouldn’t even be able to consider. All gone. For what? For my own survival? For one kid. For me. Just for me.

There is something on my face that makes people want to see me bleed, and I don’t know what it looks like—I only know what it looked like when I turned those same people into Gods with the holy blood they stole from me. You broke bread from my body one too many times—now I have none to eat myself and I’m wearing my ribs as jewels. God, are you watching now? I held onto my body thinking only about the way it would look hanging from the ceiling. I’ve gained my peace, but at what cost? Deservedness be as damned as they are; the feeling of sustaining another’s body at the cost of my own is a divine poison that I cannot describe to another and every moment that I am alive I want to be drunk or dead. Memories of people that I have left behind, left hanging, left hurting will never leave the screen that plays against my will behind my eyelids. How can I deal with what I’ve seen? How can I cope with becoming exactly what they made out of me?

My body will be buried shallow and the dirt will be left loose; know that the next time you cut me I will not be able to bleed.

The Testament of the Canonist

The Testament of the Canonist

The Testament of the Canonist

Acknowledgements

Meditation on Laicization

Autolatry as the practice of a Heretic —

The Price of a Lost Soul is Marked as Three Centesimi

to Mark the Vileness of the Work —

The Churchyards Lay Vacant —

Confessional