Static Hymns for a Dismantled Sky

The white dove hangs suspended

above a world that has already ended,

its wings spread wide yet motionless,

feathers luminous against the bruise of sky,

a halo of barbed wire crowns the soft head,

gold thorns biting where gentleness once lived.

The bird does not struggle.

It simply exists in the attitude of surrender,

yellow eyes reflecting fire it cannot escape.

Beneath, the heart has become a weapon.

No longer caged in bone,

it dangles raw and blackening,

six gun barrels sprouting from ventricles

like cruel flowers forced to bloom too soon.

Blood falls in slow, deliberate ropes,

tar-thick, shining briefly before it soaks

into earth already dead, cracked open

like lips that forgot how to pray.

To the right, the moose skull watches,

antlers branching into circuitry and frost,

goggles strapped tight over empty sockets,

headphones clamped to bone broadcasting

a hiss of static where hymns used to play.

It is both relic and machine,

a monument to listening without hearing.

Open hands float in the void, too many, too large,

palms turned upward in habitual supplication,

yet stained dark, fingers curled

as though memory still remembers grasping.

They reach toward stars that have already gone cold.

The ground is broken glass and cinder.

Flame licks upward, orange against indigo fracture,

but offers no warmth, only light

to show how completely mercy has been dismantled.

The dove circles once more, wings cutting silence,

unable to land, unable to leave.

Its shadow falls across the bleeding engine of heart,

across the deaf skull, across the empty hands,

and nothing answers.

Nothing ever will.