Notions of evil bury us deep in views of clouds the same as you.
A hot rain of futility weeps for a week rehearsing the scarlet wound.
No one sees the fury marring flesh. I am lit from within perfumed with
burning vapor. I beat my head distractedly without resurrecting consolation.
None prop us up in the furnace of hell's fairytale. The empire reaches black
and repeated, warm as blood. Tomorrow finds us grey as grief stubbornly
stealing rapture. The earth inverts while I am absent, wearing out the
cold moon's obedient grimace like tired eyes in the dark. Poising madness
with sanity, the armies stand resolute. Mysterious accomplices are everywhere
to join the siege; there is no coming to terms with the trespass of malice.
The white lips of stress stretch taut over skin, stirring pools of
drowned nerves, cool as grudges we long to leave under the sea.
A dreaming skull's cage opens and closes: hello, goodbye, yearning to
dismember the past. The whispering clock will not abandon this world
beyond ours, the after-life of a heart of black leaves where we voyage now.
The future chimes mechanic wishes left unspoken, fluent on the wind. I am
terrified by this dark place, yet accustomed to the conjuring moods of
irrevocable fate and dread, bearing witness to the workings of human folly.
The naked girl in the mirror escapes the tarnished crucifix where nothing
burns. Bodies of saints serve only one master. These candles are the curse of
Canaan; slave of slaves, suckling whores, god of graves feasting on strange
delights. Madonna nails the hand of exile to bleeding feet lost for all eternity.
We are wronged by an ancient curse, proud and victorious, dissecting bodies
and breaking bones whose dull relics are the ghost of us rattling on the tongue.
I breathe warrior songs in guilty joy pursued by wounded and timid wing thirsty
for my undoing. Promise to forget the devil's word that we heard. This could be
fatal: unequal fights annihilate the decades it takes to feed each maniac. A gullible
head feeds them honey, yet they are too hungry for anything but animosity.
An angry clambering has murdered my heaven and set them free.
The end of everything startles me still, facing dark doorways of lover's gestures.
The pale victim's eye empty of all thought unravels your image. You shrink so
small that you would forget me, until there is nothing between us anymore. You
terrible thing, can you do without me? I could vanish in a day, my grieving black
gown exiting loneliness and sorrow, yearning extinction. I am what is lacking in
me, sucking a vulnerable wound between crippled teeth. How long will this heart
wear shadow's eyesore confounded by love? God knows the origin of the unknown
land we'll meet. We depart to walk in wilderness, another way than death, never
taking a tedious risk, to lose what we shall not find. We are bound by the secrets
we share and the end that betrays us here.
Copyright © 2007, Alexis Child. All Rights Reserved.
*In Memory & Dedication To: The Vale of Dark Horses*
Published in
Sein und Werden Magazine
Winter 2007 Issue
'What the Vulture Ate for Tea'
Reprinted in the Summer Edition 2015,
Black Petals #72
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