The Flaying

John Griffin

Unflesh me now, ye winged ministers

Through heaven dancing, chanting in your choirs

Ethereal beings, vacant, dissolute,

Lit from within by candid heatless fires.

Hangman of the Lord, sharpen your knives:

With sterile implements, with barbed hooks

Peel back the skin and flense the quivering fat

And cast the entrails to the crows and rooks

So bleaching bone is all that will remain -

The vertebrae picked clean, the hollow skull -

And free the light that shines behind the eyes

Wisps of mist that drift out of the holes

Where irises once were, and leave the ground

Where suffocating flesh lies all around.