And you staggered on as the Urchin Guard, not indestructible but divisible, ghastly-golden pale, wreaking havoc in the heart of the cruel immovable Emperor who would not be betrayed, who would not be delayed in his fury. In your Praetorian days you extended your sidereal mirth, with sempiternal ambition and eternal devotion you spoke of your Firmament, capturing the twins that looked in your eyes and threatened to enter the aching chamber underneath their bare feet. Shouting you clung to their wavering robes, haunted by the threefold divinity that devoured your bones, and you prophesied, prophesied, prophesied. Oh, you could smell the reeking tomb of resignation, you could feel on your skin the dampness of doubt: “You are not wise; despair with us and feel whole. ” How many souls did you pluck from the ashes, how many cups of black tar did you empty over their bending rods? When your flesh rubbed against the dried bark, you lifted your gaze and examined the sky while leather-gloved fingers pulled on drawstrings ahead. Plague arrows burrowed into your body, tore holes into your tensioned muscles that glowed and droned with incandescent holiness. What is the length of monstrous patience, the depth of cosmic faith? How do you wait for the promised treasury when each new shaft finds its way through your organs and reveals the great wasteland? Hearing the Mauritanian archers snicker, you gasped for air, exceedingly weary, ready to kiss the barbed crown. Waiting to be compassed with the promised shield in your dreams. But you awoke coughing out moths in the house of the Roman widow, the froth of your death dissolving with each breath. On the stairwell he beheld you in horror, the persecutor astonished. “Did my Goddess not sever the thread?” he cried, and you wept with him in unison. “Diocletian, Diocletian, why do you thirst in your hatred?” A harvest of flowers bloomed in your tear duct, releasing its fragrance as you pleaded for the marble obelisk to turn to porous matter. Inflamed and ablaze, his incredulous brain did not, could not perceive the glinting arrows in your body: “Shall you now haunt me, infernal shade? What is this second sacrifice, with which you taunt me?” A smile stretched out like the Padus across your face but no secrets were revealed. Opening your arms, you only welcomed your fate. Not to arise, but to be clubbed into the ground; not to live, but to moisten the earth with your ardent blood; not to convince your condemner, but to imprint on his retina the image of your zeal forever.