Tithing

This building’s architecture
resembles my mouth how it closes
around my tongue, makes room and echoes

The hollowed arches, vaulted ceilings
I’ll bet this place is expensive
to heat in the winter. Words left in my mouth

stifle in worship
which we will colloquially call “distilled silence.”
From behind my whiskey face I ask

if you like this year’s vintage of your martyr’s
restraint. The way my jawbones break,
reset, become reliquaries. The arches of the roof

how many of you died to raise them? Is this worship,
to make me the hypocrite, my mouth's roof
built of all the words that I buried

in the tomb of my throat?
Jesus. What it must cost to heat this place.