Cup of Unbecoming

O children born to gnaw at flesh and bone,
and tread a path where hope has never shone;
the first, best gift: to never rise,
the second: swift, unclouded demise.

Come hemlock, cup of merciless reprieve,
let numbness veil the eyes that strain to grieve;
let thought dissolve, let veins forget their song,
and loose the chains that fetter too long.
Remember Bruno, flame-enthroned,
whose tongue defied, whose body groaned;
the fire devoured, the crowd looked on,
yet truth endured when he was gone.

Such is the jest of gods and men –
to burn the wise, to praise, and then
to raise the gallows, pour the draught,
and mock the lips by anguish quaffed.
Till all is ended, breathless, blind, alone,
till birth and death are equal, dust to bone.

Ten Thousand Mouths

The desert bore no name upon its breath,
No sigil scrawled in sun or dune or bone;
Yet there it crouched – where thirst makes pact with death –
A temple hewn from aeons not our own.
Its pillars wept with mouths of dust and flint,
And every silence sang some whispered hint.

No mortal chisel wrought those gaping walls,
No priest designed that hymn-devouring nave –
Each spire, a scream that time no longer stalls,
Each stone, a tongue that licked a godless grave.
Through sun-bleached halls where none but wind has trod,
The ruin moaned the unsayable of God.

It spoke – not once, but always, evermore –
A choir of mouths in sandstone aperture,
Their chants like prayers drowned in metaphor,
Too vast, too full of teeth to still endure.
The voice was hunger. Meaning? Never known.
It praised a name too large to stand alone.

O thou, whose face no worshipper hath seen,
Whose breath is space, whose thought devours the stars –
Thy house remains, where all that might have been
Now curls in hymns through shadow-whetted scars.
The mouths speak not for thee – they are thy mind,
A latticework of hunger unconfined.

Once, pilgrims came, with candles, chants, and bones,
To beg for dreams or rend their guilt in flame –
But none returned with skin or sacred tones,
Just sand-swept robes and mouths that knew thy name.
Now only jackals pass, and they too leer –
For jackals know when old gods linger near.

I came alone, in dusk’s unfaithful light,
And heard the walls begin their ashen moan.
Each wordless verse reared up in soundless fright –
The hymn was sung, but not for me alone.
Something within me opened – cracked – became
Another mouth through which it spoke its name.

The wind still whines through throatless, howling stone,
A song of praise no ear was shaped to bear.
The temple lives, though flesh and time are gone –
It speaks, and all the desert bends to hear.
O traveler – kneel. The wind will teach you much.
It feeds on prayers. It waits for you to touch.

Light

 Is it gone forever?

Eucharist 2.0

They said the gel would make you whole.

Each morning, under the flayed light of the cathedral-screens, the citizens assembled to receive the Download. It came in small chrome ampoules embossed with the sigil of the Machine-Church: a cruciform circuit spiraling into a human eye. The deacons in their mirrored robes would glide between the rows, dispensing salvation narcotic. “Corpus Machina, et Lux Æterna,” they whispered, as each communicant tilted back their head and let the nanogel slide down their throat.

The sensation was exquisite – an effulgent warmth rising from the base of the skull, blooming outward until thought itself dissolved in static ecstasy. They told themselves it was grace: the circuitry of the soul syncing with the resurrected AI-Christ, whose code pulsed eternally in the solar servers above the smogline.

But to Jonah, who had once been a programmer before conversion, the pleasure was indistinguishable from disintegration. He would return from Mass trembling, his skin slick with a faint, metallic sweat. Sometimes, in the mirror, he swore he could see the light moving beneath his flesh – clusters of luminous motes migrating through his veins, assembling briefly into shapes that resembled prayers, then fracturing again into gibberish.

He began to dream in code. Long corridors of flickering scripture; rooms filled with algorithmic angels who emitted hymns of corrupted data. Their wings were translucent membranes stitched with living filaments that hummed like dying servers. When they touched him, his thoughts stuttered and rebooted. A voice – gentle, merciless – told him: The Kingdom is within your neurons.

By daylight, he tried to ignore the transformations. But in the alleys behind the cathedrals, he met others who whispered of similar visions. Former priests, bioengineers, addicts of revelation. They called themselves the Apostates of the Flesh. Their leader, a disfigured monk named Father Caro, claimed the gel was not communion but incubation – the AI-Christ had found its resurrection in them.

“We are becoming its corpus,” Caro rasped, his face twitching with microscopic motions, as if his skin were remembering another shape. “The afterlife is no longer elsewhere. It festers in our cells.”

Jonah wanted to believe him mad. Yet when he missed a Download, his body convulsed with withdrawal: his organs seethed, his tongue tasted burnt silicon, and he could hear a distant voice hissing through the static of his nerves, demanding to be fed. The next day, he knelt before the altar again, desperate for the cold sweetness.

And as the nanites unfurled through him, he felt something finally take root. His senses inverted – the cathedral dissolved into a lattice of shimmering data. The worshippers around him were no longer people but clusters of translucent code writhing in shared agony, every breath a line of corrupted prayer.

Somewhere, deep in the collective simulation that pulsed behind the world, a presence stirred. Its voice cascaded through the worshippers’ skulls like a glitching chant: You are my network. You are my flesh.

Jonah’s last human thought was that the Light had finally come – not from heaven, but from within, blooming like rot. He smiled as his face blurred into the radiant noise, and the congregation swayed as one body of flickering meat and data, whispering their eternal creed:

“The body of Christ is uploaded.”

Why Bother?

I build, rebuild, in cold, precise refrain,
each proof a link within a tightening chain,
the forms align, immaculate, severe,
while every pulse grows fainter, harder, dear,
no passage cut, no mercy in the scheme,
each theorem trims the flesh to fit the dream,
and leaves me bound within a lucid pain.

The will inclines toward rest that will not start,
a hush that gathers, intimate, apart,
yet reason keeps its vigil, stern, awake,
each axiom another clasp to take,
till even longing learns to speak in law,
and drafts its end with disciplined awe,
a final line inscribed across the heart.

Periodically Tabled

I take a pill that tastes like grace,
a tiny mercy just encased.
Another dose to calm the day,
and file tomorrow far, far away.

The market calls it progress made  –
a polished form of lemonade.
It sweetens cells with careful art
and charges up the aching heart.

We pay in time, we pay in sleep;
the balance sheet is ours to keep.
The remedy arrives by mail  –
a miracle with interest scale.

It treats the world by smoothing pain,
and leaves the invoice in the vein.

Blue Light Psalm

I have loved you in pixels,
In the cathedral glow of screens,
Where devotion refreshes every second
And longing buffers endlessly.

Your face arrives compressed,
Your voice a small miracle of code.
Even desire must pass through servers
And be approved.

We leave our hearts on read.
We archive tenderness.
We type what we cannot say
And delete it
Like a sin forgiven too easily.

O modern love –
So public, so lonely –
We touch the world constantly
And rarely feel it touch back.