Adorning Ezekiel
One Among the Specular Spires
Cinerary whisperings haloed Ezekiel’s charred redoubt.
Masonry kept its after-applause beneath crematory carbon catechism.
A road-weary leather vessel of accumulated distances lay relinquished
beside ember-thought and cinerary remembrance.
Within the leather crypt pale mycelial liturgies
convened their clandestine commonwealth.
Cotton abandoned the shoulders in frayed filaments.
An improvised gladiatorial girding for derangement.
Torso exposed itself to nocturnal abrasion.
Branches gathered slowly for priestless pyric ignition.
Then combustion.
Low flame rehearsed itself upon fractured mercury.
The fractured specular tribunal exceeded reflection and summoned elsewhere.
Spores drifted outward like speculative astronomy.
Consumption followed the accidental sacrament.
Fungus entered thought with velveteen insurgency.
Boundary-work relinquished its architecture.
Form, once a form, reconsidered its jurisdiction.
The reflective tribunal deepened past permissible depth.
Then spires.
Immense vexed verticalities vaulted from inward weather.
Citadels of bruised emotion assembled without sanction.
Stairways pursued altitudes without theological permission.
Towers leaned like doubts attempting grandeur.
Hall after hall of injured magnificence.
No crossing was perceived.
Surrounding itself simply reconsidered allegiance.
The redoubt receded into afterimage.
Architecture inherited jurisdiction of the world.
A summit arrived beneath uncertain mortal pedestals.
Below spread provinces of delirious masonry.
The blood-dark rag thrashed like imperial bannerage.
Sable sediment made scriptural smolder of exposed skin.
Then the feral coronation cry:
I am Ezekiel.
Again the cry, more savage, more sovereign:
I am Ezekiel.
The towers returned the name in splintered sonorities.
Each spire became a throat of thundering identity.
Ezekiel.
Ezekiel.
Stomping commenced with ceremonial belligerence.
Invisible adversaries gathered in imagined ranks.
A prodigious beauty occupied the delirium’s republic.
Roman war convulsed along mountainous hallucinations.
Helmets flashed across phantasmic phalanxes.
Air received furious ceremonial adjudications.
Every shout believed its own empire.
The spire-top dance grew martial, then rabid.
Ritual and combat braided into imperial delirium.
Then perception sheared.
One instant alpine battle beneath brazen immensities.
Next instant broken masonry and dwindling ember-grammar.
Again the armies.
Again the redoubt.
Again the summit.
Again the ruin.
Intervals of ontological failure began flickering.
Delusion and actuality entered mutual trespass.
Stone replaced glory one instant too late.
A step sought empire and found vacancy.
Then descent.
Eight or nine mortal measures.
Broken lithic wreckage replaced the empire.
Skull met granite authority with abrupt black metallurgy.
Roman tumult annulled itself immediately.
Spires suffered instantaneous bankruptcy.
At the bottom of the lithic basin, optimally alone,
arterial varnish reopened its dark administration.
Cranial fracture negotiated confounded oblivion upon stone.
Above, the redoubt persisted in scorched dominion.
Some ember still practiced its pyric sermon.
The fractured specular oracle reconsidered its specular quietus.