We were the nameless
For what use is naming the wretched?
Born of rot and sorrow
Thrust upon a world pregnant with
The darkness of the soulless
Of faceless mothers
Who cradled us in prayers that
Scorched like curses,
Demanded of powerless gods overcome by slumber
A parting covenant
And fathers who never remembered
Whether we were friends or foe

When we pray, we pray to drown,
so we will never know thirst so intimately
May the Ocean’s salty waters finally lay to rest this bottomless
Beast that has taken possession of our flesh
Bodies folded in benediction, our distorted hands
Strengthened by desperation, scour the earth
Caressing it’s ruins for something, anything
To feed this hunger that threatens to eat us alive
We say praise and descend on meals of bones and claws
We swallow it all down with the bitter, sharp
Tang of suppressed dreams and nightmares alike
And when we move, the contents of our stomachs clang together
Like a forbidden orchestra
Until their jagged ends
Rip open our insides

To outlast the deafening silence of loss, we learned to
Dance, the hungriest kind of worship
Submitting to desperation’s torturous music
Scars our only adornments, for the wind,
We danced
Skirting around it’s fiery tempers
Beseeching with body and soul
For armor, for armor and
On cold icy nights,
Our bones jut out obscenely
From torn rags stolen from the dead
Offerings to the wild
Atonement for sins with origins unknown
And through it all,
The wind sings us a lullaby of chaos and melancholy

The night stretches on long and endless
We vow to survive it’s blinding torment,
Writhing animals under it’s blackened gaze, then
They pounce
Every night without fail and
We surrender our bodies for use
Vessels for desires and pleasures and fantasies not our own
By sunrise, we have died a thousand deaths and more, but
The earth rejects our bodies

We would like to mourn, split open the heavens with our
Unholy screams birthed by pain
And let it rain blood
Lay waste to this hostile space, but
Mourning is a luxury for creatures whose sun is a bright white orb of hope
Not misery’s dull grey, and so
We baptize ourselves with the blood of brethrens who have been granted absolution,
Their penance hell on Earth
The kiss of Death a sweet reprieve
Reborn, we,
The ones left behind,
Assume names of deities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Saad Chaudhry on Unsplash