Thoughts of a Loner.

Bleeding Thorns. (By Sapphirus)

He built her altar from the marrow of his convictions,
Plated it with gold of unspoken prayers,
And left offerings in forms of dreams too wild for daylight,
His ribs were once cages for a trembling heart,
Became scaffolds for her ascension,
She rose,
Not like a goddess,
But as a storm learning how to walk in skin.

He adored her grace,
Not gentle,
Nor sweet,
But with the quiet reverence of a soldier washing blood from his blade,
Before kneeling before a deity who would never kneel back,
And in return,
She blessed him with famine where he expected rain,
She turned Eden into a parable of rot,
Fed his faith to the jackals of doubt,
And smiled while doing so.

What is sacred, he asked in silence,

"When even Goddess sell devotion for vanity?"

Her touch,
Once moonlight laced in mercy,
Was now remembered as a phantom fire,
A burn that left no mark,
But changed the shape of everything it touched,
She did not lie in words,
She lied in presence,
A thousand glances laced with meanings she never meant to keep,
It wasn't the betrayal of body,
But the defilement of belief,
And belief is the holiest thing a man can give.

He was not broken,
But remade,
In wrath and steel,
In the language of thunderclouds with no intentions of rain,
No dagger pierced his flesh,
But her absence sliced far deeper,
Not with cruelty,
But with apathy dressed in silk and summer wine,

He became a ruin dressed in velvet.

A shattered hymn sung backward.

A temple set ablaze from within.

A cathedral crumbling from a whisper of rot in its beams.

He cursed no name,
Instead he disassembled faith,
Brick by sacred bricks,
Unlearned softness like it was sin,
Rewrote his scriptures in vengeance without a target.

He carries the storm like inheritance,
Sleeps with fury folded beneath his tongue,
And walks alone through the ruins of his reverence,
Knowing that the altar still stands,
But the Goddess it was built for,
Was never divine,
For love that demands worship is nothing but tyranny in laced,
And he is no martyr.

He is the last priest of a dead religion,
Torching the scriptures he once wept over.

Let her name rot in the corners of forgotten hymns,
Let every soft word choke on ash,
Let history paint her in gold,
For He knows the gilded stench of rot when it walks,
He does not forgive,
He does not remember softly,
Holding upon silence as dagger from death,
Carving lessons into the marrow of time.

"Let no man ever kneel to a God that bleeds."

The temples collapsed,
The stars blinked,
And the world for once,
Did not dare to speak his name.

~ Sapphirus