Jewel of a heart

If the heart of the beast were cast of iron, who would have smelt it
as we are ever onwards borne toward it,
raised infernal from the depths I rode along the steel length  
of a second sword, though the blood was not my own.

I entered into your House through a hidden door and all the rooms
had shutters drawn, and all the saints were hanged.
And I drew my eyes up to the rafters where the ropes were long,
where they were narrow, and from which the putrid bodies swung.

I cut them down, and I cut them down again;
All through these fields of men where the hopes that lay
were as certain twice unfolding crows, eating
the hearts of other crows, the weaker of the signet ring.

And as the chaliced bugle called lost and interrupted kings
unto the host of their forgotten wars, I sang, with the bloodlust
and the muddeep, one slicing thin the other sucking in, their
sons and daughters dragging from my matted paws.

Once upon a tribute tossed as bones before the sotted hound
I ran, clear through the clatter of a faster age and then,
when the sound could no farther, I released a pale and golden
arrow, straight through the eye of the glorious angel

founding darkness on the other side. As sheer as pleasure,
Camped in every corner, clutching and clawing and taking;
Thieves and soldiers who bore no names whittled
in these snaking flames, that gave no light,

that gave no colour, that gave no heat, no shelter, no succour;
that gave off the vile and pestered stench of bodies in a filling trench.
And here I’ve been digging my claws dull as rotted teeth
in broken jaws, for the jewel of a heart of a beast of a god.