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Only souls sifted in radiance, free from serpents

Now dream revenants divine

A heaving soil, walls of faces, see them

Outstretched but never touching

We must stay in the air, immaculate

Oh, wings of crimson filigree, free us

Keep them from dark corruption, a pendulant

nausea

Over mouths of tortured women (city of fallen

angels)

You are breathless

You are breathless

Pure, cold, dead inside

Wrapped in webs of collapsing veins

Vermiform under smiling lips of black dahlias

Spilled onto early morning sidewalks

Bedewed and benighted, dripping

Pearls of schizophrenia set free (at last)

hidden in one's heart as dust, suicidal

Maturing under the blasting suns, frozen

Inside throats of deliverers (why did she smile?)

Jaws bent back by silent rapture

Hailed as prophets, mummified, enshrined,

Breathless, dead inside

The whole world: dead inside