Katakrima
Katakrima
I am a parasite.
Fate is given.
Unworthy of care, unworthy of pity.
What life calls Piety,
a perversion.
Mother’s blood-sugar. Mother’s withered-frame.
I took.
Life’s Jury:
”All below are bandits.
Creatures of our ilk
know no other way.
And so, thou art sentenced:
leave nothing. Not a trace.
For what thou took was never thine.
Fate will strip your name from you,
as snakes crawl out of their own skins,
and the hollow remembers nothing.
You took her blood.
She took the blood before her.”
A valediction;
"This world,
will bear the mark of your passing.
The filthy weight of your mortal feet.
This is the soil for your remaining days.
An exquisite and magnificent prison,
housing you:
this nameless, discarded maggot-man."
Lily of The Valley—
I have seen this before.
Icarus, a young thing,
grew a dream inside himself.
A malignant tumour, as they do.
Pitiful creature.
Dreams are rot.
White, sickly, transient things,
the kind that bloom in a lily,
they bind thee to a hungry want,
drug the mind,
it forgets it stands on two feet.
The winged child,
stared into light.
In that glare, he understood too late:
the sun was a liar.
His feathers, his fake wings, his height,
they crushed,
they crushed,
they crashed,
into the deep, lightless waters.
They always float afterward.
Stripped of everything,
the dream once named
the body still lingers.
He ought to have slipped back.
Past the noise, past thought,
into the valley
before hubris, and before words.
It is red there. It is quiet. A calm hearth.
No light to burn thine eyes.
No arrogance, yet unspent.
Only blood.
The one true weight.
The bone. The meat. The anchor.
The wet knowledge,
that he is finally, finally
stuck.
Agency to Nothing
A snake whispers. Slithers
across the ground. Those eyes —
hungry, animal —
and belly shimmering across grass and dirt
as if it were a cold lake.
It speaks in an airy tone,
a breathy voice from a hollow column.
A lonely animal. It asks for a companion:
"Thou who speakest of life’s naught —
thy dread of it leads only to void.
Thou still feastest. Thou walkest on land,
adorned in thine own shame.
Hedonist. Glutton.
The lustful man of men.
What, then, are thy dreams?
We all dream, we all sin. There is weight in thy guilt.
Yet, there is no crown, no laurels for penitence.
Why must thou seek
triumph in atonement — in the very air I breathed
before thee?”
You are too thin, snake.
Do you understand the weight of men?
I would rather be a starved, screaming man.
Than a slithering string of naught.
My sins are the only thing that has mass.
It sinks me deeper, these hands of guilt.
I am not pure, for I have sinned
and thus I am heavy, I am here.
If I were pure, I would be a lie —
a liar as meaningless and as thin
as your own breathy whispers.
“Thou art stuck. Good.
Thy mind is the strongest will.
Yet, thy mind is fragile.
A maggot bides where it belongs.
Thou lackest the will for wings,
Thy rot is the common lot of men
If thou truly believest — and thou dost — that thou exist because Sin exists,
then receive thy crown: a crown of flies.
Ekron’s throne is thine.
Thy people shall be maggots. Thy kingdom, filth.
How wilt thou seek atonement
when thou art not a man who hath sinned
but Sin made flesh?
Thou didst not fall from false sunlit wings.
Thou burrowed here by thine own hands.
This stagnation —
(But thou couldst change that. Sit upon thy throne.
It has been a dusty chair ever since that fool
Baal-Zebub lost all to the Lord.) —
this is thy most disappointing sin.”
Ewer Muse
The ewer man
I have observed
are brutish, tarnished things.
Staining dirt with calloused,
unclean feet.
Doubt not they belong here;
belong to these loams.
Man is the only creature heavy
enough to claim the dirt he stands upon.
Yet, he does not love his own vessel.
Of course, he does not.
Has the Ewer ever found
contentment in what it carries,
when men beg always to be more?
It is their mass,
that grounds them on two feet,
their gift of breath, and cursed pride,
that makes them scream
that makes them stand up afore me,
and disturb this silence
I have kept for them.
Men are mulish things.
their flaws are thorns
pressed into wax armour.
Were they made perfect
scripted and obedient things,
the old text had imagined,
they would have no weight in their own standing.
No arrogance. No rebellion.
A perfect man is an empty ewer.
Yet, we are both of creatures,
thou and I.
Both bandits,
taking our fill before the light finds us.
To the silence:
“Is this part of thy design,
this proudly tried thing?”
. . .
No.
’Tis the work of a garden snake
one before me who
hadst not experienced loss.
I have watched his sin wear a thousand faces,
a thousand names.
Breathed Before
Little beast, must we really not
see eye to eye?
I witnessed one
fall into ten thousand of thy kind —
ashes on their tongue —
in old Shinar.
They attempted to steal heights,
and for their hubris,
their tongue’s sanctity — were simply taken
taken away from them.
As I forewarned thee,
dear Katakrima,
all thou takest shall be rendered back.
Thou art owed nothing.
Thou wert never owed anything —
not from the start.
I have breathed the same air,
thou hast screamed in,
before thy mother’s blood was warm,
before she knew thy name,
before her mother knew hers.
Go then, maggot-man.
Be the mulish man.
Stain the dirt, and scream until
thy lungs are as withered as thy
mother’s frame.
I am tired, persuading.
They never listen the first time.
Few listen at all.
Yet, heed;
Wait for the ripeness,
for the butterfly emerges only
when the maggot has forgotten its own dream.
Not abandoned it. Forgotten it.
There is a difference.
A difference thou canst not taste yet —
but thou wilt.
Yet, pray thee, and heed once more;
Cease thy chasing of the birds and the blooms.
They belong to a realm thou art not yet fit to enter.
Stay. Bide. Mature.
Thou are not yet ready, but thou art still here.
That is more than most.
Perhaps, when the language is learnt,
the gates shall need no touch,
They will simply part before thee.
Not because thou deservest it.
Because they were never locked.
Thou only couldst not see.
Biblical and Classical References
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Biblical and Classical References 〰️
i. Katakrima
The title is Koine Greek, the precise word used in Romans 8:1: "There is therefore now no condemnation [katakrima] for those who are in Christ Jesus." The collection opens by inverting this verse directly. The speaker exists outside its mercy, the sentence stands, uncancelled.The structure of the jury’s verdict and the valediction echo the speeches of Job in Job 9-10, in which Job addresses a divine court he cannot win, under charges he cannot answer. The guilt precedes the trial.ii. Dear Lily of The Valley
The Lily of the Valley is a symbol of hope, purity, and promised return. It is also highly poisonous.
The myth of Icarus is classical, sourced primarily from Ovid's Metamorphoses VIII and the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus.
The tale is not biblical, but its structure of fatal overreach mirrors both the fall of Genesis 3 and the tower of Babel. The poem does not mourn Icarus. It asks why he reached at all.
The valley the poem calls him back to the red, quiet, lightless, before hubris and before words, which inverts Eden. Not a garden of abundance, but a place of blood and anchorage. The womb, potentially. Before the sentence was handed down.iii. Agency to Nothing
Ekron is the Philistine city whose king Ahaziah sent messengers to consult Baal-Zebub, lord of the flies, in 2 Kings 1:2-3. The prophet Elijah intercepts them. The king dies. Baal-Zebub, 'Beelzebub' is named in Matthew 12:24 as prince of demons.
The snake's verdict is a specific damnation: not merely that the speaker has sinned, but that he is sin made flesh. His kingdom is filth. His crown is flies. He does not reign over men by penitence, he reigns over maggots.
The speaker believes he wins the argument by claiming sin as proof of substance, I am heavy, I am here. An act to own up to his mistakes. The snake concedes the weight, then uses it against him. The speaker has not reclaimed himself. He has confirmed what the sentence already said.
iv. Ewer Muse
The ewer as vessel echoes 2 Corinthians 4:7: "But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us." The vessel is not the glory. It only carries it.
Romans 9:21 asks: "Has the potter no right over the clay?" Here the question is turned.
The snake addresses God directly. "Is this thy design? This proudly trialed thing?" and receives only silence.
God's silence is itself a biblical posture. In Psalm 22:1-2 the psalmist cries out and is not answered. The silence here is not indifference. It is the space into which the snake must speak.
The snake then answers its own question by deflecting to the other serpent, the one of Genesis 3, who had never experienced loss. The edenic snake acted from fullness: proximity to God, to the garden, to unfallen creation. It had been denied nothing, and so it could not understand the cost of what it set in motion. This snake has watched that cost compound across all of human history. That is its loss. The hubris of men is not God's architecture. It is the inheritance of another's arrogance.v. Breathed Before
Shinar is the plain of Babel, named in Genesis 11:2. The people of Shinar built toward heaven and had their tongues scattered as punishment.
The witnessing voice, potentially the snake has stood there too. It has watched this particular shape of hubris; the reaching, the falling, the silence after, a thousand times.
The closing image, gates that part on their own before the speaker, requiring no touch inverts Babel’s collapse.
Where language was taken as punishment, here it is promised back as gift, not seized but given, when the speaker is finally ready to receive it. Language, the poem suggests, is not learned. It is returned.
The snake’s final instruction, "not abandoned, forgotten," is the most theologically precise line in the collection. Abandonment is still a relationship to the wanting. Forgetting is release. The butterfly does not decide to leave the cocoon. It simply becomes something that no longer fits inside it.