Kerosene Choir

A rusted halo hangs on twisted wire, The chancel sweats with kerosene and choir. Her vertebrae all fused to steel and glass, I drag my tongue across the molten brass. The piston-hymn is hammered through the floor, A sacrament of needles at the door. We crawl on grinding kneecaps to the sound, Where love is just a leak from broken ground. My kisses calcify in factory light, All welded shut by some indifferent night. I stretch the skin across the turbine's breath, And grin into the ceremony of death. The pistils crack, the petals turn to grit, A sacrament of solvents and split lips. I scatter rust inside the holy well, The static in my throat begins to swell. I sever circuits from the sacred flood, She feeds her wings into the blackened mud. The guilt flakes off like chrome from rusted sin, The engine chokes—and something else begins. Her pharynx is a chamber built for soot, I kiss the wound where all the wires root. The altar beats beneath a sheet of skin, I loved the ghost that machinery lives in. Her tongue is bolted to the monument, A monument of ash and dismemberment. Beneath the grinding cherubs overhead, I spread the relic of a love long dead. I just want function in the screaming cold, To drag this husk until the joints unfold. I broadcast prayers on a dying frequency, And beg the silence to devour me. I stutter psalms in razored binary, And offer nothing that you'd want from me. Let her corrode in peace, let circuits sleep, I dig my nails into the promise deep. I just want function, one more broken breath, I want to rattle in the face of death. I want to live, a twisted piece of chrome, And grind my prayer into the coming stone.