Tell me.
What else.
Because what else is there?
Even now,
after the machine has short-circuited,
after the veil has torn,
we still reach for it
like moths
frying in the memory of light.
We still want it.
And the cruelest part?
Once
answered back
by a sky that never
sent up like smoke
of prayers
A mass grave
but in screaming.
We buried it not in silence,
Here lies faith—
crushed beneath the weight
of its own invention.
Here's a tombstone.
You want a poem?
As if the flood wouldn't still come.
As if obedience was protection.
Obey.
Speak.
Kneel.
they said—
And still
Repeating.
Repeating.
Repeating.
Bleeding.
But there was only us.
Look, He's watching.
and said:
They lined the walls with mirrors
More guilt.
More verses.
More fists.
and got more fists.
who begged for mercy
This is the boy
and watched his mother die anyway.
and gave his only coin
This is the child
who still sets a place at the table.
This is the scream of the widow
that came up hollow.
bent in prayer
This is every face
This is not just your pain.
But the truth turned to glass in our mouths.
This is love.
This is forever.
This is truth.
They said:
offered candy
We took it like children
that never existed.
to a kingdom
holding out the map
and trembling hymnals,
They came with cracked smiles
Not art. Not metaphor.
unholy scripture carved into bone.
This is not James Baldwin.
The damned.
The betrayed.
The believers.
The bruised.
The blindfolded.
All of them.
them.
This is about
the great lie passed from trembling hand to trembling hand
This is about the collapse of the shared hallucination,
No more self-centered lament. No more soft-focus grief.
Understood.
The poem now dies in its birth, folds in on itself,
like a god that never was
and a faith that undoes itself
even as it tries to hold together.
