Once Upon A Time Burned Upon A Cross

A Crucible sits
in Solemn mass.
A choose fits
but they didn't make a choice
to choose this. The stake missed,
Plunged deep into a captivating plot
A conspiracy with four acts brought
16 months of fearless dealings
of hysteria and madness,
banned from school teachings.

It was a sinful dance
in the woods
where Ms. Abigail was caught
with a slave hands taught
not to be tied together
but fraught and untethered.
Upon discovery,
she falls into an unconscious state.

Panic spread,
"Witchcraft is afoot!"
In comes the reverend
hopping on his good right foot
to put the revere to an end.

The trial begins to descend.
The first two witches are his kids,
some are just friends.

The leader of the dance
is a beautiful countenance
like a fountain of joy
but a waiting woman is scorned
and broke
waning for the watchman.

The fool hurls mortar at her.
Mortar so churlish and evil, it defies order,
like refusing a king's request for provisions.
His widow steps in to comply with the revisions.

But she found new power
later erased from the revisions
in her final witching-hour
realizing her conviction:

Her convictors are the witches
weaved of secret stitches
hiding behind their corpses peeking,
wreaking havoc as they rob zombies
and burn through the ditches corpus.
The invisible world snickers
and snitches on their corpses.

These "godly" men, oh so pure,
with their precise recusants
from yesteryear, were the 3rd century sect
of rigorist heretics whom Satan first met
picking Cotton from the field.

A tower rose out of discontent.
As protests give in to Popery movements
subservient to politics, a covenant he uses.

They dissent to purify the church with schisms.
Their splinter cells leave a path of flames in their blood wake
pulsing like a burning rhythm, lurching through time,
hiding their pricks behind past crimes, hooded,
bearing the cross right side up, in a town, upside down.

They're masks predestined for Hell.
Who can see the invisible well
through an invisible wall, you'll fall.
If you’re not careful, you'll crawl
to where the fallen angels lurk
to search for God's quirks quelled
in the weather finding reason
to condemn the weathered man.

The leader of the witches is Samuel Parris,
from London England, not from Paris,
a son of a cloth merchant without enough land
to cultivate, import, supply and demand.

He journeys to the solemn mass,
a choose fits, he chose this mass.
But the mass didn't choose him,
or this place in Salem.

"King Phillip" had combed them there
with his metacomb
after "King Alexander" was slew
driving them eastward to the lot
devastated by war and the pox.
Betrayed, they knew, they grew,
like Indians now praying for the dew,

their families gone
with the cries of the dying,
dying within them.

The pure were warned of the plot
of this Indian who would rather pray
than be condemned to the stretchery
and did nothing but adjourn.
A gavel rapped, John Sassamon's torn.
Another disappearance into the frozen pond
of forlorn.

Three red scapegoats are appointed.
They can see beyond innocence
with holy ointments, those anointed.
And ignorance they burn upon a stake.

They take,
reverence,
as how much you pay,
how big is their take,
your cake’s their cake
and they eat it too.
It's for your sake,
mass is at noon.

Its arrogance where their purity comes in
with the stage door left wide open,
less they need to make a quick escape
or send for more ointments.

The war ensues. A war of attrition soothes
the light pouring in stressing their religious views
fake as self-righteousness to rule as God's pigeons.
taking free-will, so we can't make our own decisions.
Treated like swill, told, "Confess, be slain, or kill"


Which never existed.
Millions were burned.
The ashes I sifted.
It's just ash.
It gets in my eyes.
It stings.

And they will burn us all
if we die and forget the cost
and recall all is lost of all
of why we were

once upon a time,
burned upon a cross.