When Your Faith Is Consumptive

​When your faith is consumptive,
It is faith in numbers, in a building,
Faith in knives, in burning kites,
In the book cover’s gilding,

It is a curse, it is decay,
It is a rot the spreads across
The world. It is drinking the mash,
Gathering and clinking the dross,

Devotion to the dirty water
Trickling between the cobblestones,
Wrinkling into cracks that have
No beauty. They rattle magic bones,

Those who see them shake, they
Have sixteen rows of teeth, they
And the graves where lust still smoulders,
And fetid smoke curls into the day.