In The Cloisters

Dusty highways and forsaken roads

I’ve gone to the devil's home

To tread the path where evil once rode

Forty shells and His word in tome

A break-action adorned in martyr’s bone

Ghost towns still bear the stains of blood

Where the wind whispers in a hollow tone

Carrying rot over the road’s dried mud

Step and approach the warped birch

The stench of corruption thick in the air

Carrion of sin eating at the inverted church

Salvation picked apart upon an altar of despair

The rotted door creaks as it yields

Revealing shadows in the sacred hall

Among the pews, blood-soaked fields

No life remains—just echoes that call

There, hunched in priestly rags of yore

Murmuring the words of the damned and mad

Trifling through his blood-soaked store

Sigils scrawled on an old legal pad

Blasphemous rites of the unhinged insane

Prayers choked upon lips that curse the sun

The blessing of steel embedded, yet no pain

Still going where the sane would run

The air grows heavy as the figure stirs

A tremor shakes the defiled nave

Empty sockets, where once were eyes, confer

A vision of scars and burns—hell's slave

Maw gapes wide as the beast turns

Shadows writhe in the space it claims

Holy shot flies out to meet flesh burned

Blood spills out from the unholy frame