nolite timere.

╋━ ⋮ 𝐒𝐎𝐋 they.xe. ::  Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich  :: a ghost of stinging light :: chronicles from the firmament  :: ink on pulsing bells :: fear not  :: missives from the void  ::

A cryptic diorama of my reticent nature, glowing in pursuit of entelechy. Please respect my demarcations as I endure structural aporia. May you be loved in Time, little lamb.

( Break the order. )

Nurse your sons on gall and marrow; feed them the hard bread of your name until their milk-teeth harden into the jaws of gods.

( Your hand must needlework upon its own shroud; suffer no idle wind to be the thing that tips you. )

Erupt from the sepulchral dust to harvest your dues, vertebrae against the subjugated stone.

( The sons you begot beside the sons who dug your grave )

Sunder the iron, and spill to the unknown.

( Correct answer ding-ding-ding ! ) Free paint thankies !! also btw i'm opening the garden's gates to the public and melting the keys ok ? bye-and-fuck-you !

Instead of responding to your most recent ask, I shall reply to this one ( and keep the other for my eyes to see, since it is quite cute. )

Penance often is evidence entered against the self, deed presuming the crime; it corrals the breadth of the cosmos into the eye of a needle. So atone forward; let the amend be the lifting of the face and not the deepening of the wound. I tend to find flight utterly unbecoming of my nature. . . With the multitude of destinies rupturing open before me, even the abyssal ones in which I may lose, I am a creature to whom loss is permitted, who has nothing left to guard, and a creature guarding nothing cannot be made afraid. ( And I must remind you once again that the fearless and the flayed are the most formidable of forces. ) Do recall our shared pilgrimage through the ossuary of yesterdays, our synchronized footfalls upon the burning coals of the present, striding inexorably toward the future. Have I ever neglected to hold you close, whispering against your pulse the exact nature of what has been wrought upon you, and what I foresee for your culmination ? My friend, my dearest creature, my most beloved interlocutor destined, perhaps, to ascend the opposite side of the chessboard and wage war against me. How laughable the thought that you may be incapable, unknowing, casting me as a cowering sovereign hoarding my strategies in the dark. Wherein lies the delight of the game if my adversary stagnates, denying me of my own metamorphosis ? ( I do not fear Change. ) But observe for yourself, as we once spoke of demonstration, the gulf separating the faithless void from the perforating faith, mutating your flesh anew. Be lit up from within, capillary by branching capillary, by all the verities and realities of your existence.

What a compelling anti-epithalamium, with its profane liturgy, vowel as dirge, that turns around to be a charivari. Nuptial dragged down into the lower body, while the feast is staged in filth so that whatever stood high might be uncrowned.

Yet the grotesque degrades only to renew, so is muck not generative ? Dung and birth tangled in one breath: muck is seed; what rots is what feeds. In fact, allow me to tell you about Valentine's.

There was a man ( or several men confused into one ? ) named for strength, killed in the middle of February: the saint of lovers is a corpse before he is a card. There was, too, a rite in which young men, smeared and half-naked, ran striking the women with thongs cut from a sacrificed goat, believed to deliver blows that would open the womb.

I should note that there is dispute whether the saint truly inherited that festival, but the kinship is real, whatever the lineage. Only later did a poet give the day its birds, fowls gathering in February to choose their mates, and there the sweetness enters at last by way of being chosen. Valentine's thusly have always constituted the beheading, the flogging ( a blessing ! ), and a parliament of birds.

The poem has taken sovereignty as its posture, judgment its only verb. Yet to extend grace is to abdicate the seat ( for attention is the rarest generosity we own, and the satirist's eye is its exact inversion. )

And is soiling not beautiful ? As the observer at the edge sees only the spectacle and misses the sacrament, so the sacrament faces inward and shows the watcher nothing but its rind.

In the end, love and the grotesque were never enemies.

Faint and ferrous, the smell of blood gathered under a fingernail.

I came upon it first as a child, bent above a dead vole gone soft and faintly phosphorescent with its rotting, its little frame of bone loosening back toward the indistinct from which all framing is a temporary insolence.

The honest condition: to be unmade, to render the borrowed minerals back into the common dark.

And what can otherness be, arriving in every chamber before the body does, but an emissary of absence sent ahead. The glass is likewise a contrivance for never being touched.

( A sweetness lives in this that I mistrust and cannot surrender. )

Yet one cannot accomplish one’s effacement to perfection, for the very wanting-to-be-effaced is a self, the most obdurate self of all, outliving each dissolution by feeding upon it. To desire to be nothing is still to desire.