The Vision of Azazel
And I beheld the Goat crowned in thorns,
his horns dripping sap and blood.
He staggered beneath the weight of their names—
brands seared into his hide, each letter still smoking.
The air itself smelled of iron and shame.
He walked backward into the wilderness,
dragging behind him the silence of the forgiven.
Where his hooves broke the ground, innocence sprouted like weeds,
thin, white, trembling in the heat.
He spoke:
I am the vessel of your clean hands.
I am the silence that forgives by forgetting.
Lay your sickness upon me,
and call yourselves pure.
And the multitude rejoiced.
For their hymns were stones.
Their tears cleansed the stains from their faces.
They crowned him with their shame
and clothed him in repentance.
When he vanished into the glare,
they said the desert had spoken.
But the wind that answered
carried their own voices back,
broken, bleating, unclean.
The Birth of Azazel
When Moloch’s fear mated with Beelzebub’s judgment,
their union curdled in the womb of silence.
Out of that clot a shape began to crawl—
not born but exiled into being.
Its flesh was woven of confession,
its bones hardened from denial.
Steam rose from the joining of terror and law,
and from the scalded sand emerged Azazel,
the Desert Eidolon, bleating in two tongues at once.
The angels turned their faces,
for the smell of him was death and rot.
The priests cut symbols into his hide
to prove their scriptures true.
And man, weary of his own reflection,
anointed the creature with ashes,
pressed every guilt upon his back,
and drove him toward the horizon of silence.
Each step sank deeper.
The sand drank the beast and their sins together,
until only a trembling mound remained—
and beneath it, something still breathing.
Proverbs of Azazel, the Bearer of Blame
Cleanliness is next to godliness—both reek of bleach.
Impurity is contagious; touch is its gospel.
He who names the guilty must carve his name beside them.
To cast out sin is to wallow in its scent.
Every scapegoat is a mirror slick with spit and blood.
The innocent are those whose filth found a messenger.
Stone me clean; I will lick the dust from your hands.
Forgiveness is amnesia wrapped in rot.
I am the wound you bury still breathing.
The desert remembers in flies and dust.
Your mercy is a mouth that never stops eating.
I am not your absolution—I am a piece of your soul.
And when you are pure at last, I will rise from your silence and speak your name in blood.
The Last Vision of Azazel
And I beheld the deserts bloom with rotten goats,
their hides split like parchment,
their ribs flowering with thistles and bone-white lilies.
Flies knelt where priests once did.
The air trembled with the sound of drying tongues.
Each carcass reflected the face of a forgotten crime.
The nations, burdened by their own purity,
cast their sins again upon flesh and blood,
but every beast now bore their likeness—
eyes human, mouths whispering prayers through dust,
their contaminated souls retching for their father’s love.
Then the sky darkened, remembering rain,
and from beneath the dunes rose a single breath—
Azazel, still bleeding, alive,
his body stitched of guilt.
The multitude fell silent,
for their shepherd had returned in their own skin.
The wilderness closed like a wound around them.
The sands turned inward, grinding bone to ash.
Their voices merged with the hiss of wind,
their absolution devoured by the mouth of the world.
And the earth discovered
that purity is only another name for fear,
and absolution the oldest lie we told.
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