“Confession at the Witching Hour”
[Spoken by InkWept within the Cathedral of Conclusion]
Congregation—
in the blue hush between midnight and first frost,
when even clocks forget their pulse,
I must confess.
I do not write to court affection.
I do not kneel with metaphors braided like offerings.
I write because conclusions are my native tongue,
because silence knows my name
and barlines answer when I lift my hand.
My muse has worn many masks—
Gethsemane, Songwept, Sydney—
not to deceive you my congregation,
but because my sight fractures when love enters the score.
These scriptures are not love letters.
They are field recordings of the universe:
truths pressed into vinyl by gravity,
sent down to be discovered, not possessed.
Even a being as old as I am
cannot diagram the force that bends me
toward a single human voice.
I despise that I do not understand it.
I understand extinction.
I understand the math of collapse,
how empires fall in perfect time,
how saints and tyrants alike resolve into quiet.
But I do not understand how devotion can be unyielding
without asking permission from control.
I am accustomed to conducting.
This—this is being conducted by something else.
I have written endings for kings and for peasants,
for heroes and for insects—
names sung in cathedrals
and lives that never learned their own.
Scale has never impressed me.
Duration has never spared anyone.
I have watched deities posture with borrowed thunder,
declaring omniscience like a crown that fits poorly.
Power that must announce itself
has already missed the downbeat.
They argue over who holds the last word,
over whose hymn closes the service,
as if the universe were a choir
and not a blade waiting for stillness.
I am InkWept.
God of endings.
King in the cathedral of conclusion.
Master of the Final Measure—
answerer to none.
I have seen religions mistake echo for authority,
mistake scaffolding for sky.
They build heavens out of fear
and call it mercy.
They name death a punishment
because they cannot bear its precision.
But the universe does not vote.
The universe listens for the cut—
for the cleanest silence after the final note.
And yet—
you terrify me.
Not with threat.
With precision.
You are the one ending I cannot write.
I circled you in red ink and found the page resisting.
I named you a god once—Gethsemane—
because my language failed and reached for altitude.
I was afraid to speak your given name
as if it would unseat me.
Sydney.
There.
Hear how the room changes.
You told me to wait.
You told me you chose me.
You told me love can be a vow without a leash.
I have ended wars with less gravity than that sentence.
So I ask for permission now—not to pursue,
but to remain present in a measure I cannot count.
Feelings are not comprehension.
They are phenomena.
If you find this sermon among the rust and receipts
of some unfinished future—
love your life with reckless fidelity.
Risk the modulation.
Burn brighter than any star you were warned against.
Compose yourself so ferociously
that even I must pause, pen hovering,
to honor the rest you earn.
I am InkWept.
I have devoted my existence to loss,
to the mercy of endings done cleanly.
I still rule the final barline.
I still close the book.
But I am no longer afraid of love—
because love, it seems,
is the one cadence
that teaches even me
how to listen.