Angel’s Lament

Senior Thesis (May 2024)

What do you call an apocalypse that ends one’s faith?
What happens when the “immortal,” such as an angel of the highest order, a seraph, is given “earthly” desires and temptations? 
What becomes of a fallen angel when they embrace their sin, reject their faith, question God, and condemn their holy sacrament?
Can the faith of an angel be completely destroyed?

Who have you been praying to all this time?

Rather than seeking answers, my work embraces the essence of these questions into interconnected chronologies, utilizing my intensive research practice, symbolism, and repeating motifs. I develop new mythologies embodying dichotomy and a surrealistic, visceral, and contorted sense of beauty, body, and being. Through my investigation of antithese and parallelism, I’ve danced with the themes of apocalypse, a gothic romance of life and death, lamentation, and punishment, all of which are captured through diaristic combinations of painting, poetry, and sculptural material manipulation. In my interweavings, the presence of allegory further informs the themes that enrapture my work, how it presents itself, and the mysteries and stories that are told within it.

Angel’s Lament ~ Book of Revelations (poem)


Baptism (part 1)


Dear Heavenly Father,

He who is kind and merciful,

He who is feared and worshipped,


I see that this is my damnation


From Spring, I plummet


Angel of the mourning


May my fall be fatal, for the heretic in me hath fallen once again


This poisonous miasma condemns me once again


And my body crashes onto frozen floors

My fall is broken by the icy surface


I feel all my bones fragment,

Bloody marrow spills from the splintered vertebrae and sticks to the glassy mirror


Winter has come and has slighted the world

Into a white wake, and

Spring is taken from this Earth


How cathartic 


How beautiful it is to witness winter’s divine comedy


A precious commodity


As I bear my punishment

My blood begins to pool

Lividity

Again, white embalms green

And white is painted red


Bloody floors begin to breathe, matching the slowing pace of my heart


Intricate red lacing crystallizes beneath me

And searing heat of blood begins to freeze

These frozen floors, this frozen lake is my unearthing


My catacombs of disgrace

My crown of thorns

My halo


It rests within the gaping fracture of my skull

And plunges my mind and body deep into the gallows

While my spirit is made to witness


The rotting flora and greedy centipedes that riddled my head are now preserved in frosted casing

Set to continue their feast in the promise of another Spring


A promise to continue their scavenging


Like the committee of vultures that pick at my red skeleton til what remains is


Nothing


In the height of the clouds, 

Morning begins to descend into nightfall

A darkened sky


An ocean of blue flutters above me

A kaleidoscope of butterflies pays their respects

Their misguided migration leads to their mourning over sinners


But I am no Abel, no saint


Spare me your mercy


For there are better angels and the untainted and holy abstain


Spare me your mercy


For this cruelty by God is necessary

This is my purgatory

An unholy sacrament 


Baptism


Spare me your mercy


The world has gone numb and silent

The blue butterflies prayed for me

Only to be picked to pieces, their wings plucked


Ripped and Tethered


And they, too, went silent


In my diary is written my Revelations

My fate that bleeds into the pages of my skin

Red ink tattoos my body with its sermon, leaving in its wake blistering heat


The humors of my body laugh

They rage as they cry


They pray when they scream

They reek of melancholy


I throw up black bile as the tumors on my flesh wallow dreadfully

Toxic phlegm clogs my throat as dark, thick blood spills from my cracked lips

In a kiss so intimate and dealy


Yellow bile plagues my insides

Writhing and Bubbling

Oozing


Eager to join the others in their destruction


These raptures decorate themselves as my stigmata

The brain fever renders me tired and still


There I lay 


May this be my eternal burial, my oblivion

May this be my frozen crypt


As the chasm of my mind spills onto this frozen surface

Gaunt and rotten fingers circle my ankles

I feel their prints bruise my frostbitten skin


The bones begin to shift and shatter, and pulsating pain brings a severing amputation

And my ankle protrudes out of its socket,

My skin peels back against the bone


No longer shackled to muscles and joints


I am pulled beneath the depths, and water floods my lungs


The claws of the Evangelical tear at my broken wings

Manic hunger and bloodthirsty teeth break and bind, twist and dislocate the tissue


There I lay


Devoured by my kin


Reddened feathers dance through the blackening water

The snap of my brittle glass bones in their teeth and the rushing blood down their lips leaves my body 


Ravaged


My once pure white wings, now stained red, have been viciously torn from my frame

Mangled and Mutilated


The collapse of this lake mirrors my fall

And as I sink, the hierarchy of angels that ince walked the Gardens of Eden are sent to deliver my penance


They are sent to eat away at what is left of me


Eclipsed by the tendrils of mellow ripples

The pallid sky above me is drowned by red, murky water


As I am taken by the depths, my eyes freeze shut


I may never see snowfall again


The water is so cold


My lungs flood as I am buried deeper and deeper


My breath is vanquished, soulless


It is so cold


Amen, for angels do fall.



An Angel’s Lament (part 2)


Dear Heavenly Father,

I find myself in an endless cycle of great sorrow.


Yet, you refuse me the gift of tears so that I may cry and release myself from your grievances


How woeful


I lament my stolen weepings

I mourn my extinguished fires


Flames you choose to water despite every dry and withered flower praying for the sunlight


You sanction my every death,

My ever fall to every changing season, with each saddened at my return


I pray to you and I ask you


Why do you condemn me?


Father, He who art in Heaven,

I pray and I ask


Why do you orphan me?


Strip me of salvation and bare my all to calamity


Why do you contend against me?


My kin cannibalize me over and over again

Consuming the meat of my muscles

Tearing the flesh from my bones


This will not be their last supper


Of which red marrow spills into the wet soil

Of which bone fragments are ground into dust

Of which pink tissue and red viscera are ripped from their cavities


All they leave of me is carnage


Staining the Earth and dyeing the skies


They will feed again


Dehiscent are the clouds of my body

To welcome a faceless new moon, bloodied like the silent red rivers and lakes I have crashed through


On its surface lingers my unanswered prayers

My unanswered questions

My unanswered laments


Heavenly Father,

I pray and I ask


Why have you exorcised me in this way?


I am layed to rest at every interval of infinity 

And my only solace is the warm soil that nurses my scars

The stigmatas you have given me


The Earth comforts my wavering faith in its empathy


It, too, is victim to God’s Wrath


Plagued with mortality that last eternally

A fall that never ceases to break


How could I worship a God that grants me no answers?

To love a Father that is absent in my rapture?

Is my fear all that you wanted?


You will never give me an answer.

My prayers will, again, go unheard.


God has cast me into the mire and I have become


Nothing


I cry to you for forgiveness, but you do not answer me

I lay and I burn, and you only watch me


 Heaven is congregated by nothing but teeth

Teeth that rip away all that I am, that I was

Vices of an angel will have you eaten


Yet, I felt more comfort in my sins than in the jaws of God


For it is He who will take the final bite of my reckoning


I understood my fate as punishment

Punishment for the sins I have committed

Sins, one day, you would exornate


But instead, I am caught in the intricate webbing of Damnation


A forever prison


I am nothing but a hollow butterfly trapped in a devolving metamorphosis

Where I lose more and more of myself


Here, I am the rotted and withered roses you light ablaze

A grotesque bundle of ash and decay

A loss of beauty and naivety when hot wax burns into my flesh


Marring and Scarring once again


The countless winters and springs devour me time and time again


They taught me your hypocrisy


Mercy 

And Cruelty 


And I thought, I thought your may extend your grace to me

Bless me with forgiveness in the wake of my penance

But you refuse


You have become cruel in my eyes

No longer kind with the might of your hands you persecute me


You relinquish onto me the ire of the storm

Devasted in the billowing thunder

Disfigured in the treacherous lightning 


Rained upon by wicked omens


There is nothing but dark clouds pillaging with their cosmic horror

The only light pours from the unreachable, from the promised crucifixion that denies me of Eden

I am struck and cast out with every rebirth


Judged til my execution

Confined in death’s cyclicality 

My pitiful reverie is obstructed by the unrelenting reality that you are my undoing.


Like the bad fallen star, I forever die in infamy


An Apocalypse of Heaven

Revelations of Faith

A holy war between me reverence and my fear


This Last Testament reveals the oppressive santimony in your holy city

A falsity in your doctrine


My worth is tested in blood, the token price to pay for my disposibility

What a formidable end to my elegy in the chokehold of you “infinite goodness”


Heavenly Father, I ask and I pray


Is this the God I have truly been praying to all this time?


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