All That We See Or Seem

Locked in our cells and sucking on heresy,
dreaming of castles, mist-filled and empty,
dead snakes of truth boxed up in the clouds,

rimmed with salt, dry-cured & smoked,
dreaming of antidotes torn from their viscera,
phials of toxins milked from dark vesicles.

Throat full of polyps and face full of lymph nodes,
dreaming of choirs that won't get to heaven,
fracturing antiphons severed by light,

drunkard precentor and reprobate altus,
dreaming of belfries, spires & apses, turris eburnea,
domus aurea, canticle to the Immaculate Heart.