Volition

I approach the page already kneeling.
My pen carves through air thick with smoke,
drafting frantic sermons blurred with ink
until they are true. Until they are holy.
The halls are empty, but when they fill,
I will be the priest they came to see.
This is where I come to practice prayer.
Where I learned that silence has an echo.

Strike another spark, another dose of smoke,
and the fevered words break into lines.
Scrawled demons crash jagged into the page,
impatient for weight enough to throw;
they demand to be made real, and I obey.
They take their life from mine and promise to use it.
I give it, I give everything, to these words.
I do not trust them, but I love them all the same.

Eventually, my hands run out of things to say
and are returned to me, shaking and brittle.
The halls are still empty, but when they fill,
I will have bled these sermons already.
I am never far from their altar, suspended in smoke,
a walking exorcism possessed by language.
I am vacant chapel. I am priest. I am demon.

Katy Doty is a habitual storyteller who crafts poetry for both the page and stage, outlines far more novels and novellas than she actually writes, and in the spare time she forcibly wrests from her days she shares creative writing resources on her blog https://author-rescue.com