better that the dome of night shiver
below sinful seraphim, their nacreous orbs fuming laws inferred,
epiphany pooling like molten steel
in the tarnished bloodstream of a lone truck bed,
besainting dearth as chrism oil,
alluding that running became sacrament,
that being torn asunder was a humility,

than to lie dumb beneath haughty asterisms
seeking evasive sonants on steamy glass,
where “love” thawed like an eidolic oath,
and i, benighted author of crave, parrot
your rebirth as if invoking an evensong,
loath to forsake the vow of your dawn,
because to conceive oblivion would be the true heresy.

“Suffer.
Oh, how they will suffer.
Pretty land,
So fair and meek,
How you shall suffer!
As I bring out my Fury.
For this land,
Isolated,
Hiding,
And alive,
Will feel the sting of my word.”
My head sang this,
As my anger burned,
And I fed myself with not the pains of my journey,
But with the growing danger inside.
I grew closer.
And sang.
“Oh, meek land,
Tremble,
For Wrath is here.”

“A book a day saves one from the enemy.”
I often told myself this.
As I leaned my ear to the pages of a leather-bound world.
The world spoke to me.
It’s inky words, etched into parchment, jumped at me,
Asking me to see into their lands.
See how they formed and died.
You may ask,
“Conqueror! How can this be so?”
Well, I will tell you.
Before, in my youth, my demon
This Wrath,
Often spoke in tongues.
Words that confused me, yet spoke to me.
I found them either soothing or scorching to my soul.
And it left me in tears.
“Learn thy enemy.”
The words of my father often told me.
Then in my darkness, I used them as strength.
Wrath chose to incline its breath upon my ears.
So to keep it at bay,
Make another’s words stronger than its own.
From there, I sought the word of stories.
Adventures.
Fantasies.
Myths.
Beautiful as they were enchanting,
Became my saving grace.
As the words of books surrounded me,
Did the demon find trouble.
Wrath chose to sing loud.
But the books, as I taught myself to bend to their will, would speak even louder.
Damsels,
Cloaked villains,
Heroes with swords!
They all sought me.
And became my friends.
And Wrath?
Became a whisper.
So small,
So far into my mind, I could no longer hear it.
But when the book was placed down, it ****** me with a single word.
"Please."

“Travel the land.”
I put foot over foot forward.
“Search it.”
My lungs burned from the scorching sands.
“Demand from it your goal.”
No water in sight.
No civilization for me to claim.
“No turning back.”
I took myself to the highest point in this **** desert.
I did not look up,
But down.
“For if we do, we shall eat of the blade we once scorned.”
And upon my gaze turning toward the lowest point,
Within a desert so vast,
That not even the tumbleweeds could stand alone,
Did I see.
A small city.
My home.
“At last,
I am here.”
I burned a smile upon my selfish lips.
“And I shall have what is mine.”

“Have there be no end to our suffering?”
I, Conqueror of many lands, asked.
For though, even in my doubt, I held something worse.
Wrath.
In my mission, my search for purpose, I had learned many a tale of demons.
Demons so vicious they stole your soul,
Devouring every bit of essence you held.
From my forefathers to my descendants,
We made it our purpose to vanquish demons.
“Train!”
My father told me, as his father told him.
“Train as those have before you. Learn thy enemy.”
And so, I did.
Every story, lesson, and artifact of my enemy was no foreign object to my eyes and ears.
I, often, fell upon the foot of the Lord,
And asked him,
“From the very Dawn,
To the Dusk,
I have been your servant.
I have stayed by your side.
Today, in gratitude and happiness, I ask you: Give me your word.
I hope to hear you.”
And often, not a word was spared.
No.
Instead,
A feeling took the place of the answers I sought.
Grateful as I was, and still am,
My ears sought more.
I feared asking further would lead to my dismay and demise.
So in place of my fear, anger bloomed.
Anger with no purpose other than feasting on my flesh.
Feeding itself with my weakness.
I saw it in the face once
In my doubt
In my hunger for more
I saw it scream.
Oh child,
It said.
Child, child!
Why do we beg?
To a voice, not even so, but an idea?
I turned away from such ideas it gave me.
And burned it to a world where it shall not feed on me, but itself.
Sometimes,
In the depths of my doubt,
Do I still hear it scream.

Inside the waters of my mind
There are underlying words to what I feel.
Whether or not I can hear them,
Or the world can see them,
They remain sinking to the bottom of this giant ocean.
And yet I bring myself out of the ocean and fall into dry desert.
Here, the land is vast, and the span of civilization ceases to exist.
I cannot find the signs toward my people.
I try to step back, but the ocean has dried up.
And on a mission, my body moves
Desperate to quench my dying thirst.
Desperate for the faces so familiar.
So I can find the sea of my sanity.
Although I have seen it once,
I knew the lands would not be easy to find.
There were many obstacles that I once had to face.
Long ago,
In the era of darkness,
Buzzards,
Vultures,
And roaches plague the land.
Ruins were all the eye could see
In this city of decay.
For in this city, the land knew of a tale.
The tale of a girl.
Red-eyed and destructive.
She carried her blade,
A scythe, made of the flesh of lies.
It stayed by her side,
Night and Day.
Morning til Dusk.
There was no way out of her wrath.
And where she went, she laid destruction in her path.
The ground would tremble,
The mountains parted for her, crumbling to dust,
And her fury had no end.
For years, this cycle of destruction, death, and evil would conquer the lands.
Not a soul knew what to do.
But then, not many souls knew me.
They did not venture into the mind that was mine.
They did not know me.
They did not see me.
Only I knew myself,
And the only one who knew better was the Lord himself.
And through words of flame, did my secrets pour out.
All the land knew when to hide,
Save themselves from the thunder between she and this sole prayer she often spoke of.
“Oh, Dusk,  How you loathe me!
How you force me to tremble under your weight.
For it is when the night sky travels across the globe
And the stars twinkle across the land
That I find myself at the foot of the Lord.
I look high into Heaven.
And I ask
‘Do you see me?
See me and seek to help me in my search?’
But as my eyes close,
And the Dawn approaches,
I open to a world of evil.
Fiends and foes, more so all around.
But after much reflection, I can only see one Demon.
And it is me.”
For when no mere mortal could withstand her word,
Did the world shield itself.
And allow themselves to feel her blade of lies.
So in this moment, as I scoured the world for the sea,
I knew to find it
I would have to bend time and reality to my will.
And face my demons.

I reach for you
out of habit,
and touch only the dust
where love used to live.

But the quiet we left behind
stays.
And stays.
And stays.