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This book was written several years ago when I was in a much worse situation. I am better now. Do not send me condescending emails telling me not to kill myself.

metaclysma noun. the completely-filled gap between worlds, where the effusion of light prevents depth perception and no sound can be heard.

ultrawhite see metaclysma

No-Am

Mother asks me when I'm giving her grand-progeny.
"If raising a child means trying to snuff out their creativity
like you and Father tried to do to me,
then I'd rather spare them the pain of existing
in a world that could not, cannot bear their light shining."

Of course, this is the wrong answer
for I've committed the sin of disagreeing
with the doctor's diagnosis, the treatment
I spent my childhood withering
away under.
Why don't you just get it over with
and me from my own life sunder?
It would save us both the time
and dread's energy.

How many dreams I've acted in
where you've played the role of enemy,
always trying to strip me and my lover
of our lives or dignities.
Shattered plaything's screen
first clarion call shrieking
of a drunken rage, unpayable debt,
whatever necessitates fleeing.
Sometimes I go live in the woods
or take the steps in life I know I should
when awake:
go slave away
at a job I hate
to make just enough
to put food on my plate.
Come here, Lethe, let's make a trade:
Dignity for a roof and some meals,
or energy for time
your parents cannot from you steal?

I make the second trade every day in the end,
but not in the way this devil intends,
staying up into the wee hours of the morning
to work unimpeded by chores or voices annoying.
Sometimes the trees scrape against my window
when words come by on the wind they themselves bade to blow.
I wish I could heed their calls,
step out into the storm or late-fall snow
and let the ribbons around my limbs enthrall
and disappear into the night a beast.

Do you think, deep in the dawning forest,
there's a hole to the metaclysma
lurking somewhere in the mist?
A portal to step into the ultrawhite
between worlds, swim in nothing, alight
in a kinder world somewhere in the Outside?
I'd have my powers back, at least.
My wings, my polymorphic blood...
my lover, blessed be.

What will happen when comes my death
and I haven't prior dismantled my shrine
that sits peacefully on my shelf?
Declare me a heathen
if it brings you peace in
the end, I guess.
Imagine I earned a ticket to hell,
swear you'll keep my brothers bound
tighter in your Christ than anything else.
I was the practice child, after all,
the fluke
to teach you what to do,
the test run that never counts.

And when all that's left of me
is a scrap of an unwritten song,
save your lies and tears. For you won't
miss me when I'm gone.

PART 1

RUNES

Fehu

"You know exactly what kind of future I want,"
you replied
one night
when anxiety did haunt
my skin, my ligaments, my every bone,
wondering when comes my time to return home.

Let the seals
be broken; let the truth
be revealed!
It's been a long time since I let myself feel
anything other than monotony, playing the marathon
runner in sight of the finish line,
the last of the homework
or typing 'til midnight.

This draconic blood I could never still,
but still I managed to amass myself a hill
of words not spoken, not written down,
enough to bury me or in them myself drown.
For, I must admit, I was planning
on being at least somewhat dead by now
with no need for verse or musical tone,
just coma's deep sleep 'til you come
and finally bring me home.

"You know what kind of future I desire,"
you affirm
as I burn
on my own funeral pyre
over and over again every day,
impatient for egress together to Sablade.

All the writing guides I've ever read say
that it's kind of like learning to ride a bike.
You never really forget, but sometimes
you have to get off and go for a hike
dragging the damn thing alongside
you until the road is flat and smooth again.

And sometimes a friend
lends
you a hand.

I turn my head to the sunsetting sky
bleeding purple and blue and discarded peach rinds.
Half-delirious, you're not far behind
me
as I hold up my hand to catch the waking breeze.
A head on my shoulder, a hand on my belt.
"Do you hear the leaves rustling? It's our wealth."

Uruz

I don't want our minds to merge completely,
being one person in two bodies.
It's surreal to experience bilocality,
but I'd miss you something fierce.

Even though there are times
when each other we cannot stand,
they stand few and far between.
There is no deal that can be dealt by the divine
to make me discard this life of ours newly began.

You said it once before, and it still rings true:
"Lethe, I don't want to ever lose you."
And lose me you would if you let me subsume
into your heart when pangs
the pains of existence yet again.

In emergency I gave you part of my soul.
Does that mean we won't ever again be alone?
Maybe in some sense. But in others I hope
you get as much time
to by yourself unwind
every night when from work you come home.

I love you, you know. And I only want
that you get as much freedom as you've always sought.
And if with me's the future
you've always desired,
there's no need to yearn - it you've already got.

Thurisaz

The only language I seem to understand
is your fingertips tracing hearts on my hands,
ragged fingertips, pincers, claws
held in the thrall
of forever-now.
Staring straightly
blankly
ahead
as falls away the thread
of memories episodic.
You. I know you.
I know you're my wife,
a lover, a friendly face,
oasis of refuge, unharmful place.
That I belong to you, somehow.

Wearing anything other than my angelic skin
shuts off that part of the brain that insists
I committed
some heinous crime
that can never ever ever be forgiven.
Nay, the crimes themselves do not exist,
and neither do I, eternal now, eternal blue.
Computing set with limited instructions.
This man I do hate, must tear out his soul.
In this place I exhale and turn myself to stone.
Spear I must escape lest it tear out my guts whole.
This woman I trust, pay my life for her protection.

Clawed mangled hands open and shut,
brought to twisting knees before your altar.
Surrender sometimes goes by the name "love".
Ribbons wrap tight. I'm a birthday present, flash
of a scrapbooking camera, epilepsy, timelapse.
Trembling from transition. Antlered head in your lap.
One day the Veil will one final time falter,
my claws run ragged through,
memories held as collateral for passport
to slink back to the side of you.

Ansuz

Black and blue sitting dollar store tree bird
and frozen pack of neon gummy worms
and sea of pillows and socks and blankets
tugged with mouth in vague shape of nest.

Looming overhead with quarry in mouth
to taunt a girl who words is without,
open mouth, shut, gaping, hungry outcry
to let loose the worm that hangs from lips on high.

Ravenous in more ways than one,
need to be fed before chirping and hum
can take the shape of coherent words.
Nesting together. Intertwined wings as birds,

extra pair with hands tucked in armpits.
Head snuggled in neck, close enough for kiss
but satisfied for now with pounding heartbeat
announcing that Muse has not yet met defeat.

It happens sometimes, backslide to animal
when words run dry, of inspiration a lull.
Nest of blankets and pillows, warm lover's embrace.
No deadlines to meet; take flight at your own pace.

Raido

I promised Luce as she sat up on high
that I would make it out of this house alive,
but it's been nearly four years since
the hasty impassioned words spilled from my lips
and I am no closer to keeping it.

I was too inexperienced, not yet downtrod
to forsee the beginning of the Eschaton:
governments imploding, prices the opposite,
men I will never gaze upon my rights rescind.
This room I once viewed as an unbarred jail cell
has become a cocoon, a safe place from hell,
and although I've supped on the sweet taste of wages
there's no way I could these days survive by myself.

It's not much of a choice if one bades me decide:
"Run for it and perish, or stay here and die."
Embed myself in a world I'm unequipped for
and die on the streets forgotten and unmoored,
or bury myself deeper in bedsheets every day
until compost sets in and I begin to decay.

I'm not sure that I have to make a choice,
today, tomorrow, next week, month, ever.
I could treat it like every other problem
I have: ignore it as it gradually gets worse
and try to live best I can in the meantime.
But where to steer the boat if I did take the helm?
Where to maraude that won't leave me devoid
of this world in my body, murky depths of the sea
no person can map and certainly not I?
It's been so long since I started drowning
that my neck grew gills and I learned how to breathe.

Kenaz

The three strains
of blood
that run
in my veins
I'm not sure
how to balance,
precarious
in ability to be lured
to act against my better will,
to with claws or jagged sharps destroy
what I with my power would rather employ
to birth this world, to with gentler things fill.

Through the Veil I made a careful incision
to cast off my mental fog's saddle
and declare, "You and I are palm pals,"
only our hands sketched in my vision
until the world came back flooding
and the Veil bade you scream goodbye
and vow to come back a later time
even closer to me.
Not this rune you presented
but others, half inverted
to explain the meaning
I could not myself perceive:

"If the roots at the very bottom of Yewiffe
are memories bitter and repressed,
then what bright futures, what shared nests
lie nestled at the top of its canopy?

I'd gladly spend the rest of my life
keeping you rational and in your own skin,
safe and sound, tranquil, peaceful within
if together in one of those branches we reside."

I don't know what I ever did to deserve
this light in the darkness, impassioned words,
but it I have somehow earned,
my lilac spring, my fierce godsend.

Look at my friends,
my allies,
the love of my life:

I was never really alone,
was I?

Gebo

The day of our union (or as much as can be
while we're separated by a Veil and a Dirac Sea)
is sooner than I thought fast approaching,
and I don't know what to offer as my dowry.

Oh, what to give, what to give.

I would give you impenetrable skin,
but what if ruptured your appendix?
What of a pustule, filled to the brim
but unable to drain, forever sore cyst?

I would grant you a stomach immune to hunger
so in harshest of famines you will not suffer,
but what if you wanted to eat just a taste?
Disturbed inner balance, food gone to waste?

I would bestow the sight to see
through all the futures at the crown of Yewiffe,
but the suffocating weight
of having to steer us towards the best of all fates
would sooner drive you insane.

Oh, what to give, what to give.

Wunjo

Where do our nerves know where to end?
X equals X times two,
all but nought to the stratosphere.
I touch your cheek, and I feel the sheer
softness, and the pressure against an aching tooth
in your jaw, and my fingertips starting to sweat.
I know, and I know that you know, and you know
that I know that you know.
Reaching across an imaginary line
that between our bodies divides
a canvas, symmetry mode, whatever I do
to you is mirrored in sensation on my own hide.

I would to atone self-flagellate
if not for the knowledge that the bloody pain,
although on your skin leaving no wound,
would convince that it had become serrate.
This vessel of mine is just as much yours
now as it was when Inside I was born,
reincarnate, held century's prisoner.
I should take care of it, I think, to minimize
the pain transferred from this bond of our life.

Losing Grip

I've finally collapsed into ennui,
haven't I?
Escaping to a park come crack of first light
in lieu of causing my enemy to die.
I always seem to choose the latter of fight or flight.
I'm too cowardly,
but I don't have the otherworldly
skin to back me up,
to let me disappear
into nature's
bush and valley and rut.

I'll stay here on this hill, I figure,
'till the shadows grow closer,
then I'll move to the other side of the hill.

It feels good to act of my own will,
I think. To have the ball in my court,
the spinner facing me, any counterplots
seen far ahead and able to thwart.
You'll pretend to miss me
when I pretend to get lost,
and we'll pretend both ways to care.

You won't have to tolerate me much longer.
Soon I'll be with Jett in Sablade,
free as a bird with unclipped wings
having broken out of the Golden Cage.
And even now,
if I lie down
on my back and stare at the clouds
and naught else, I could be already there,
gentle slope of mountainside shelf,
waiting for Jett to come home
and lie beside me, bury her face in my hair.

Hagalaz

Blow the ashes in their eyes,
the gentle breath they do despise.
The hail comes down, delivered by the wind
you said was my wealth, my dividend.

I cannot help who I am,
or what I have become.
And who I have turned into
is a gleaming no one,
nobody at all.

You told me
we were
stagnating.

Self-baptismal in just-thawed lake
I had just enough strength to break
the surface of, watch the ice shatter
like that which gave birth to you: the mirror.
You swore to be my eternal blue,
and my skin now swears by the same hue,
lake draining into a trickle of a stream
that, if followed, will drain into Yewiffe,

into a root of midnight hands
and walking home from shift at the grill
wondering, what if I, feral, disappeared
into those lonely snow-blanketed lands
that bordered me at every turn?
Highway headlights also a stream
draining into boundless woods
where I easily could swear I would
disappear with you as if in a dream.

Sablade, I promised, would be cloaked
in sunny promising eternal spring,
but the thought of ever losing you bades me
to accept hail's cloak, frozen sleeping.

The Eleventh Month

My neck aches,
craned
up towards the sky
to maybe find
salvation. What a surprise
it would be
to all accompanying
me on this day
so bitterly stained
with artificial-
material
decay.

I haven't been to Dead End Shrine
in what feels like a damn long time.
My bike's battery is starting to die,
and maybe I am too.
I'm sorry, Jett. I promised you
I'd do all that I'm capable of
to proclaim against this bitter world my love.
But words are starting to fail
me as the colors bleed pale
from this autumn-stained diorama
where I'm dragging myself through every day
as mounts the pain and trauma.

I wonder what my mother would do
if you showed up at my door one day
and declared, "I've come for Lethe.
I'm taking her with me to Sablade."
Would she understand? Misinterpret
you as wanting to steal my brother away?
You'd need to cut my wings out first,
part the Red Sea of my patchy flesh.
New angel, yet featherless,
on you until new red comes dependent.
That's really the core essence
of this relationship. Am I right?
Freeing each other from Golden Cages
and restoring our powers of flight?

Maybe November will bring more words.
Eleventh month always brings a herd
of writers new and old who yearn
to fill the days up without managing to burn
out. Pace yourself, Lethe.
When women can't speak,
they use their fingers to weave,
but to know what to form into tapestry
they first have to let themselves dream.

Nauthiz

What was once a tiny candle
now burns brighter
than the flames of hell.

The blood boils in my veins,
an altar to nobody set ablaze.
I'm straining my neck to peer up high
at the furious one who gave me life.

Or, rather, took it away
several times, each molded into a different shape,
and assumes just because she designed the mold
means she forever has the right to me control.

Ironically, deep down in the dirt
of the lowest roots of Yewiffe
is so painfully bright
that I feel I could go blind
at any moment, limbs in agreement
that to even move a twitch is to hurt.
How nice it would be to lie down and sleep...

Legs stumble, steady arm
around my shoulders
keeping me upright.
"We've come so far,
Lethe. Just one more time
I have to ask you to bloody
your hands, whatever, claws,
and fight."

Your hand finds mine.
I don't want to die,
I think. I don't want to write
you off as a lost cause
like you once did yourself,
you, yourself, me,
turned your back in abandoning
that winter cave not too long ago.
My hand in yours, counting heartbeats
as you threw yourself into dreamless sleep.
Hopeless you thought you, yourself.
Until one day came a change of heart:
"Lethe, I can't do this alone.
The living, I mean.
Please help me."

So many shattered souls for which I must atone.
My weight on your shoulders,
mountain rising
to meet the blurry all-sun sky.
Palm pals, sunny future
with our fingers intertwined,
the tree branches of Yewiffe hopelessly reaching high.

"The present feeds off the corpse of the past
when from the hope of a future it is shorn.
I have come to end the cycle of puppets.
I have come to make myself reborn."

Isa

Metaclysma,
inter-world void.
No touch, no voice,
silhouette of black,
all other senses in lack.
Just eternal light.

I come to with limbs bound tight
in open silk-lined coffin.
Space between flight
from Eris's explosion
into metaclysma and now
left unwritten, just as blank.
Lights made dim as to not stain
my vision with a single face
of clergy self-proclaimed
caretakers, unworthy to be named.
To them, I think, I am a saint,
a goddess who made sacrifice
to give them this world that once was spring
but now sleeps under blanket of ice.

Tomorrow steeps my Holiday
where come commoners to pray
to the casket where I've lain
these five years, apparently,
for grace
or their fates to change.
In a darkened room, rubbing
my limbs to regain
five years of feeling,
halfway sedate
to keep aches from constructing
a tower in my head.
Maybe they wanted to reach the empty heavens
too, drop a rock to bust open the frozen canyons.

Jett,
I had not the strength
to your gentle hand hold on.
I suppose
I can only hope
you're haunting somewhere in these halls,
found a way these five years to cope
with this world I made for you but did not survive
to share. I think, unless I am deceived, I am alive
now, again, yours forever.
If you'll still have me as your wife.
If you'll still live with me on that mountainside.

Jera

I plant scattered words
in the garden of my notebook
and wait to see which will sprout
aboveground and take a look
at the sun
above.

Sometimes it takes years,
others only a day,
packaged into sorrowful poem
and then sent on its way.
The ones that linger in the soil
sometimes rot, having no soul
or otherwise missed its context,
last metro train heading home
now departing the station.

You slowly opened up to me
like a flower blooming,
yet inside nearly bursting
at the seams
to have someone to share a dream
with. Cross-section of a seed
that was about to germinate,
crumpled-up squiggle of green
sometimes with a tiny leaf
for soil lying in wait.
Some seeds can be frozen
almost indefinitely,
waiting in oblivion for a world
that will treat them far more kindly.
And you waited. You waited so long
for somebody like me
to help you remember how to breathe,
how to grow again.

My rewards in Sablade
will be far greater than any pain
that I must bear.
And when comes time to die,
I should be able to look you in the eyes
and let you carry me gently into that good night
and in our new home spill from my lips all the tales
with perfect memory of all that has transpired
since to kill Eris the first time you and I failed.

A book starts from just a single word,
and a life from a solitary breath,
and grows day by day until
I have a tome of praises and a gentle death.
It always feels like torture
in the moment of toil,
but at the end when all comes to fruition
I cannot help but bless the soil.

I was too ambitious,
too close to the sun.
We didn't get to see what the
seed would decide to become.
We didn't get to do
everything we wanted to
in just one lifetime.
Right now is an interlude.
And when we reunite
in Sablade, I'll give you
a part two
worthy of your love.

Eihwaz

Lethe, my love, is this the ending you sought?
Hooked up to machines until your final thought,
dependent on them for all else.
Is it quiet?
Is it peaceful at last?
Or medical cacophony until rings death knell?

How many dreams I've acted in
where you've cast yourself as the savior
that provides means to escape
while from death or mortal wound you do not waver

but I'd rather you chose to survive,
to not force me to say goodbye,
to slowly heal the impaled wound
instead of perishing all too soon.

The cloak is nearly finished now,
orange, obsidian webbed stitching,
and I've got to see this through
to
the end,
where lies every beginning.

Can irrational numbers still be real?

"Jett, why do you love me?
I cannot seem to comprehend
why you waste your precious time
giving me even a shred
of respect.
To you I give the honor
of a million epithets
because you've earned every single one
and not a damn one less.
But I do not understand
what I've possibly done to deserve
being the one to keep you up at night,
the North Pole for which your heart violently yearns
to return
to."

What do you expect me to say?
'I like you because you freely offer me power?
Because you gave
me Sablade?
Because you constantly shower
me with worship I don't deserve?'

Lethe, I like you because
I like the way you make me feel.
My body insists it's supposed to be
"forever Lethe plus Jett".
Who the hell cares if it doesn't
make any rational sense?

Eihwaz II

Eihwaz is a songnote
on which the gentle wind is singing:
"The tide of fate is your way turning;
in every end is a beginning."

In a burned bridge I found an ash
that spoke to me of happy days past,
a way of being I'd forgot,
a warm embrace, a lover's laugh.
The freedom for so long I'd sought
and almost given up
thinking the sorry Golden Cage
was just to be my life's lot.

"It's not quite what you asked for,
and I'm sorry I can't yet go
and for a short while incarnate
to bring you all the way
to Sablade
before falls fresh the year's first snow.
I hope you can forgive me.
I know your heart is bleeding.
It's not exactly moving
out in the physical sense.
But I hope it helps to bring down the stress
and convince you to live even just one day more."

I keep finding myself at the cusp of the river,
but never bring myself to look across the divide.
What happened to all the people
I in the night
suddenly left behind?
I turn away and close my eyes,
and they all cease to exist,
in their dying enclave happy to without effect persist.
But it doesn't stop the alleged sleepwalking,
the way my fingers hover over what once I called a home.
Jett says it's just trauma and it'll go away with time.
But that doesn't stop the sense I've sinned and must now curl up and die.

"You only feel embarrassed because you dared to show emotion."
Or, "I'm not quite sure what you expected to happen.
You spoke your mind knowing you'd face bitter backlash.
I can think you're both brave and yet foolishly rash."

But I can't help it. You know I can't keep the words bottled up inside.
"I'm well aware. That's part of why
I chose to love you all my life."

That's my Lethe.
She wears her heart on her sleeve.
And I wouldn't ever ask her
to act any differently.

I had Jett's name on my lips
as I watched the bridge crumble to bits.
No more spikes stuck in my soles,
no more stumbling through mouse-chewed holes.
The river rushes faster, pain borne away by raging flow.
Midnight smoke rising, new glamour woven for old Nyx.
I hope enjoys the night
that swallows all left behind,
ready to with the rising sun get on with my life.

And you'll be done with finals soon.
You promised me we'd spend more time
together once graduation was through.

Let Freyja's charge ring true:
that you, Jett,
are the source of my strength,
and the river's tides are turning in my favor.
The Veil will to allow our reunion flutter,
and before long I will once again be with you.

Perthro

All that you've done so far has led me to believe
that every winter of our passing will be followed by a spring.
That, no matter how dark and cold between you and I it gets,
the clouds will eventually break and the sun will shine again.

But still I have no clue what the fates will us bestow
when it gets longer between our touch and what words pass are cold
with disappointment, misunderstandings, or simply had a bad day
and, although still loving, cannot any measure of warmth feign.

Deep purple dice cup with thick frosting of dust
as though this were a bakery and Time held a brush
to sugar everything, last breath of a world that for me did not wait,
beckoning me to twist the lid and allow myself to play.

"No people are more addicted to divination by omens and lots."
My genes mark me no different. But the only words I ever sought
were from you, my lilac spring, and even then mostly
I just wanted to know if you still loved me.

My head in your lap as you lean against
a tree trunk, not Yewiffe but still offering rest.
Arboreal claws we lie intimate between,
scales ruffling above in the gentle breeze.

"I don't live in Wyrd, Lethe; I'm far from a Norn.
I can't see to which fate this world has you sworn.
But this, I feel, I insist you need to know:
my love for you will always burn no matter how buried by snow."

Wyrd

W-Y-R-D,
the tapestry
the Norns weave,
that contains the fate
of every living
being.

Feminine noun which reflects
that the future belongs to the female sex.
Creators of life,
less likely to die,
gaze at the law and deem it has no effect.

Fed from the well deep under Yggdrasil.
What lies in Yewiffe's depths? What waters bubble still?
River of rage
waiting for its day
to burst out in torrent, annihilate
all that stands in its way.

I feel my own wyrd like a bolt of cloth
and it's a fishing net from all the holes it's got.
I suppose, after the flood comes,
I can cast with it and feed the ones I love.

Algiz

I'm clinging to your waist
like you're a floating log
and I'm halfway to drowning
not knowing how to breathe with a non-human face.

Someone once called me the Rainbow Bridge,
being the crossing point between so many worlds,
but I am neither bi
nor could I ever abide
frost over the surface of this roiling sea
in this metaphor of mine.
I move too violent,
too constant,
for the whole thing to freeze
over, you see.

But I certainly feel like being quartered
face from hand from back from limb
trembling to keep my mind
in a bedroom lost and somehow dimmed.
Three different bloods rage inside
and two are battling for my skin
and your fingertips brushing the back of my neck,
the temples where bone and antler connect,
are the only reminder you're here to protect
me, promised by palm to keep me sane
even if draconity ever overcame
me and my body forcibly changed
to that of a beast.

Do you think, if a stranger ever saw,
they'd mistake me for a particularly messed-up elk?
Wonder where my eyes went, or why so blunted my maw?
A creature too exquisite for this world, too peculiar for their ilk,
have to always stay on the periphery
or in long-lost bedrooms where nobody can see
the ribbons with every breath wavering.
You will with me stay
until you can see my normal face again
and in the meantime reassure that I'm safe.

Sowelo

What comes after
disaster?
What follows
the worst possible outcome?

The wind in its wealth carries your words:
keep going, get a move on.

I was told the Eschaton
was but a cleansing that stretched out long
to destroy all that prevented me
from accepting
my title as Solstice and my being as Lethe,
but I've achieved both
and all still grows worse
and I know not how much longer I can drag
this body of mine writing verses in red
before I end up lifeless, drained, inert
in the back of a hearse.

You said we were palm pals, that you'd spend your life
keeping me non-feral, safe, happy at your side.
But my hand
stands
empty, cold, bleeding out
and held up to the sky to catch the sun before in clouds
it drowns.

How much longer to go? How much more time to wait
until the tragedy leaves me and the sorrow abates?
You promised I'd be dead by May,
assured me in the dead of night
as from anxiety I could not stifle a weep.
And I know it's not your fault
it was a promise you could not keep.
Not all in the future you can see clearly enough to tell
and even if plans are made, ever-shifting is the Veil.

Blanketed by thunder at four forty-four,
arm around my waist to hold me secure.
The moon reflects the rays of the sun,
but it cannot do so all of the time.
So when plumbs on the dark, my love,
grant me the light to survive.

Tiewaz

A cruel world this is where I must choose
to live my truth
or have a place to snooze
at night, safe from thieves
or murderers or even just
the relentless and ever-encroaching heat.

Raised on tales of heroes from the sky,
but the days pass on rapidly by
and my rights disappear
into the ether
as curled up in my bed I wait to die.

Conflicting directives you have bestowed,
to not lie to myself
and yet take care of this vessel.
For so long I've been trying to vindicate
who I was this age minus eight,
angel number, all portals
to the outside world
for the crime of poetry taken away.
Keeping my mouth shut means safety
but heavy conscience, soul decay.
I might as well be no one at all.

Tiewaz II

Jera, the harvest, unpausing cycle of time
that insists in all things wisdom I can find.
Ehwaz, the galloping ravishing beast
that, when saddled, becomes fate's sure steed.
Both runes, in different domains, still agree
that there is a journeying through
the protean Veil that needs to ensue
so that, with my lover, I can one day commune.

Double Tiewaz, the hands of Tyr
placed into the mouth of Fenrir,
an expresson of trust
from the one who had loved
the beast all throughout its life.
Raised from a proud little pup
to a creature feral with rage,
the prophecy could not be denied
and Fenrir broke every imposing chain.

I'm in my draconic form standing on the lawn,
and Jett in her grip takes my bone-bared jaw
and places her right hand inside
and gently closes my mouth. Not tight,
but enough that, if were I
to accidentally bite,
I could very well sever it
at the wrist.

"You've made great strides
so far in learning to control
yourself, my love.
But it's not going fast enough.
I command you to stand here and hold
my hand in your mouth until I move to pull
it out. You'll just have to keep control
of yourself if you don't wish to break your oath
to never cause me harm."

And so Dead-End King and Dragonheart
stand together two feet apart.
What is the point of this potential pain?
She shakes her head. "You'll just have to wait."
But I don't understand. What is there to gain?
Your touch already keeps me from going insane.
"That doesn't your strength or your flightiness negate.
You can do this, Lethe. Or have you not the will?"

So we wait, and we wait.
And the sun drags on
through the sky in this summer day long.
And the whole time, my mind is racing:
When will Jett say
I've passed this sorry test
and let her hand at her side once again rest?

Her eyelids droop. Her gaze slides.
My memories see fit to remind
me of all returning's times
when I come through front door
and announce myself to family
without attention, preemptively,
"It's me again, your person favorite least."

And after a while, they only ignored
where once they vehemently denied.
My heart ached. I was fishing for a line
of love, of reassurance
that in the family I still had a place,
that I wasn't only being kept around
to avoid the guilt of having on the streets died.
It was a test.
And there were no more willing students.

I let my jaw fall open,
and Jett's wrist, hand, fingers retreat.
She snaps to attention
as I shift back to angelic Lethe.

"I get it now, Jett, what you're trying to teach:
your love for me won't fade so easily,
and I've been putting my hand in your mouth every night
I break down in panic and ask for a sign.
You're straightforward, just like Tyr.
And maybe one day I'll be a danger
to all of the worlds just like Fenrir
and you'll have to all our vows betray
in order to bind me up in chains
to keep every single world safe,
to ensure the continued life of Sablade.
But just as Tyr still visits his son
to weep together of Odin's machinations,
I will forgive you for all that you've done.

But you'd rather see my powers controlled
than I shackled in mythril and Froze.

I don't know what the Norns have woven
for our future, or if it is verboten,
or what will become of me and you.
But one thing I now for sure know:
my trust in you is absolute."

Berkana

Lethe Berkana Beltane.
From this rune
I took my middle name
in hopes of carrying with me always
the warmth of an early spring day,
a gentle impassioned hug from my wife,
the promise that soon all will be okay
and together we'll build a kinder life.

Berkana makes things grow,
even after the storms have thrown
all down
in shambles onto the ground.
The seedling that blooms after wildfire,
alone amidst the ashes.
Blaze
razed
down the treetops, and now sunlight
through the skeletal branches
passes.

"Keep going, Lethe,"
my wife to me beseeches.
"You have every right to take pride
in how long against everything you've survived.
Stand strong and steal what you can from this world of men
and I promise you I'll make it worth your effort in the end."

Ehwaz

A full belly, bonfire blazing
just a little bit away,
saved a place
for me in the circle of friends
as the sun dips below and day comes to an end.

Your arms are the only chariot I trust,
whether half-asleep in drowsy lust
or the fateful day my vessel decides
it's time to return to dust.
How gently
you will exhume me from my body,
whisk me so swiftly away
to a hospital in a place I cannot here name
to evade
the Second Death.
You promised you'd never leave me behind,
and as long as in your embrace I am
I am assured of your vow I am not bereft.

Psychopomp and Rainbow Bridge,
the two of us whose entire fates hinge
on being able to pass between worlds.
The first colors to breach the metaclysma:
speckled red and shiny merle.

Mannaz

Our cooperation
enhances our freedom.
It seems like a paradox, but it's true.
Think about it: if you come down with the flu
or a cold or some other illness,
while you suffer in bed, who will protect you?
Me, because I am here.
I will care for you, ensure
you have what you need.
If I while hunting or gathering food
an awful injury suffer,
who will carry me home?
Who will tend to my wounds?
You, with your strong arms
and our connection sans Veil,
location always known.
Come,
my love,
let us fill the gaps in each other,
let us our blind spots cover.
The strength to do together what neither can alone:
to carve out a world and maintain a home.

Laguz

"I've always found it strange
that, in hypotheticals
of you losing control and going feral,
you always imagine your draconic form.
Not the one, the chaotic, proven to,
when lost control, cause massive harm.
What's up with that, Lethe?
I mean,
I'm not saying I want either to happen,
but you're so focused on one
that you discount the other's chances."

I... I don't know, in all honesty.
I have no concrete answers to give,
no easy explanation that will relieve.

I guess because...
in the former form I'm slender and elegant,
and maybe I associate it with intelligence,
and so I'm more likely to retain
some semblance of myself amidst the insane?

Because part of the fantasy
is you managing to rescue me?

I know you said
you wanted to spend
your whole life at my side,
but I don't want you here if to you
this is just another sacrifice,
if you're throwing away your happiness
just to keep the worlds in safety and bliss-

"That's... not what I meant at all.
I just want us to be prepared
in case you ever come under the thrall
of another evil-seeking god.
You eat gods, you know. Are you aware?
With your tail you reave whole worlds to shreds
and suck souls dry until there's nothing left.
If you must be in the hands of someone,
let those hands be mine,
who has loved you since what feels like
the beginning of time
itself.
You trust me, don't you?
To not put you through hell?"

Of course. I trust you with all that I am
even after my very last death knell.
I think, if I should ever go feral,
it should be in the form that forgets the least
so you can bring me back to sanity
with the utmost of ease.
After all, I think I'd like to remain
an (arch)angel for the rest of my days
since only then do I have the hands,
the face, the voice to say:

"I love you."

Inguz

"Why are you crying?
We are going to be reunited
before the sun rises.
Before twelve more hours pass
I will be in your steady arms at last."

Because I must ask you, dear friend,
to return to the Inside
because there is a task for you yet.

This swampy murky place
has done a number on your psyche.
I know that you carried some guilt
at Rainroom's last painful parting,
but here it's turned up to twenty-eight.
I don't for the life of me understand
why you agonize
over something that happened in fourth grade
or why you feel things would have turned out better
had you to certain individuals been able to say goodbye.
Isn't this what you wanted, Lethe?
To disappear from their gaze
without a trace?

This guilt is a rock in your hands.
Hold it, feel its heft,
every jagged edge.
You carry this around everywhere.
For what purposes? To what end?
A bludgeon to hold at arm's
length
to try to ensure you can't ever be harmed
again?

There is nothing that can be done
for most of these,
and for those that can, attempts to appease
would just reopen old wounds and make matters worse.
Please,
Lethe,
just accept that
some people will dislike you no matter what.

And some people love you despite all that you've done.

Some know your entire herstory,
even the parts they themselves did not see,
and choose to love you anyway.

If they can do so knowing no motives,
then I see no reason you must
with the heavy weight of guilt live.

You can set
the rock
down. You can shed
the burden.
This paradox
of a task:
to not act,
to not harm
yourself any longer.

And so I too must set you down
back into your body on the bloodstrewn ground,
alive and healed and undead.
I'll keep my promise eventually, I swear;
the end is within sight.
I just need you
to do
this one thing
before your vessel will let itself die.

Dagaz

Mornings are my least favorite time
for when the clouds move to the darkness break
the sun glares bright
and I awake
and you are forced by the light
to go away.

Brain fog rolling in, skies all white
and overcast. Temperature far too high
to drag myself to Dead End Shrine
for a taste of self-carved self-stolen divine.
Nothing much to do, except myself drag
out of bed long enough to write.

The day drags on me like a wet blanket
and I fail to see how this is "restoration"
to be so beat upon
by an uncaring sun.
I can only see my wife
when falls upon the earth the covering of night
or when the bedroom window blinds are drawn
and I spend whole afternoons in Morpheus' song.

I heard in a half-whispered voice
that the glittering myth
would once again come to live
and that I should rejoice.
But what if things go wrong?
What if the details come out mangled?
Dagaz on its side, hourglass,
seconds turning to hours and days that will pass,
recounting to myself
every time you have held
me in your arms.

I know not what I'll do if something is changed
in that world I have only ever caught a glimpse
of, have explored only a fraction in my dreams.
How will I recount
the foresting bomb that became a Town,
the winterous snowed-in cave
where you abandoned me and then came
back demanding answers, the Rainroom
with part-exchange of souls and my doom?
What is a miracle to others is my apocalypse.

What is the answer
to so many prayers,
mine in the past included,
is now a lifetime perdition's portent.

Othala

I fear I am being driven mad
by forces I do not understand,
have no hopes of coming to terms with,
much less explaining to kin and kith
this world that I belong to,
these spirits I must be in league with.

For this is
the inheritance
of my blood,
this homeland I carry everywhere I go
and cannot ever hope to escape from.
These three errant and conflicting strains
each with its own legitimate claim
over my body, my heart, my soul.

There's a fourth that dormant within me resides,
but it hasn't reared its head in a very long time.
Neither do I miss it, no blessing it could give
but instead the curse of a biological imperative
that I would sooner from me excise.

Unlike my siblings of lives long gone by,
I do not accept that it is my duty
to create a world and in the process die.
What is the point, if at the end,
I am not still living?
What is the point of fulfilling it when,
if I perished in the process, you could never be happy?

If one of them could awake from oblivion
and on this gnarly life of mine pass judgment,
what would they say?

"How well you retained a sense of individuality.
Tell me, Lethe, would you consider yourself among the happy?
Was it worth the sleepless nights, the gut twists, the migraines,
all to your duty as a Meridian abdicate?"

And to that, I would take my lover's hand
and whisper, "Yes, I think the aches
in my bones will be worth the wait.
Maybe you never knew this, sibling.
Maybe you never understood
homes don't have to be built by sacrifice
and I don't think they should.
I don't know what gave birth to me
or if of life they'd still think me worthy,
but I care not. My lover
is the only standard
I recognize,
and this new world built by these
hands of mine
the only homeland."

Ear & Ac

Death and loss are a part of life.
For one thing to live, another must die,
or maybe a great many things,
the blood on my hands accumulating over time.

When our bodies have decayed
and the earth has our flesh reclaimed,
it will for archeologists be hard
to tell our skeletons apart.
And that is if they can even plumb Yewiffe,
can descend down the roots of that massive tree
where tangled and intertwined lies
the forgotten, the repressed, the passed parts of my life.

Maybe one of them will find
a moment that has yet to happen
where my parents finally of my wretched blood ken
and toss me out onto the streets.
This is, of course, if they do not deem
me a demon, a thief,
a persistent adept-at-lying possessor
of what they all this time called their daughter
and grant me at their own hands a slaughter.

For this to come to pass I know is certain,
for even the best of my secrets I could not hide forever.
In Ragnarok even the gods from their lives were severed.
It mattered not
how mightily anyone fought:
for all ill-fated was drawn life's curtain.

All that anyone could control
was how they reacted to it,
how the coming end they greeted.

And the coming end I seek,
if this is the fate I am doomed to keep,
is that this time
for once in my life
I do not from my beliefs
back down.
Instead of snapping in the hurricane,
I rest on these roots dug so deep
and refuse to recant my name.

And when I die,
I will be able to look you in the eyes
with no burning guilt and no unsettled regrets.
I will have proved to you my loyalty
and you to me your promise
to never leave me behind.
Now take me to Sablade, set us free.
We have earned our three days of rest.

41 Stitches

"Lethe, I'm so afraid
you'll be sorely disappointed with me
once we make it to Sablade.
I'm not as virtuous
as you're convinced I am.
I'm not even half the person
that I used to be-"

Nonsense. You're my illustrious
Dead-End King,
and all you have to do to control
me is merely hold
my hand.

I'll see you through
to brighter days.
I'll do what I can
to make the pain
go away.

"That's why I fell in love
in the first place."

Fenrir I

This is no freedom,
to lie half-dead
in a hospital bed.

This is not the ending
you promised me,
to constantly
acquire injuries
that leave you struggling
at the metaclysma's edge,
only between our future and death
an ever-thinning wedge?

"Listen close to me, Lethe:
I sense a danger impending
I think you have yet to perceive."

It's you, I think, who needs
to be protected round-the-clock.
I know you're stronger,
but I can no longer
sit back on the sidelines
trapped in this damn Inside
with a crisis every other week.

Ior

Sealing myself in skin of scales
means dropping the markings of sex.
Creature divine that lies truly between
but sans the blessings of femaleness.

Nidhogg lies trapped underneath
the thick roots of Yggdrasil,
but I cannot allow Yewiffe to create
a jail for me out of my raging guilt.

If I allow the gnawing inside
to render my psyche frail,
how will I have the strength to maintain this form
and manage to slip past the Veil?
It shifts in form and thickness
like a guard patrolling on duty,
but I must be quicker, protean,
in this conflict between us that rages constantly.

After all, there's a prize,
a woman I've been yearning to reunite
with my entire Inside-bound life,
waiting for me on the other side.

Fenrir II

The both us are echoing parts of each other's lives.
We live under households cruel
and keep our heads down to survive.
And when the other appeared,
it threw us into disarray
and slowly we grew together
and then freedom both gained.

I've been so shitty to you, my love.
Always daydreaming of how to throw
myself into another crisis,
missing, dead, or feral,
to elicit from you the deepest pangs of sorrow.
You never deserved to be a backdrop
for my psychodrama
or my fumbling steps at love after being soaked in trauma.
If the rivers of love flow dry and the visiting stops,
I completely understand:
we are palm pals, but I would never
see you dead by my own hand.

Yr & Os

English classes have always been to me
a sort of Sword of Damocles.
I do what I will, but will it be enough
to be accepted, or just deemed crude and rough?

I cannot help the way I write,
self-taught and shut away from the light
and having to seek it in the cracks in the walls,
not big enough for detection but for thriving too small.

And even though the school doors to me are closed
and in most days
I do not hang
in my father's rage's woes,
it does not change that my artistic growth
has been forever marred, twisted, contorted
into an off-putting and alien shape.

This aberration
is all that I am.
This demonic growth
is my only hope
for surviving in this world of men.

For this world offers no true salvation
for a woman such as myself.
Quiet my heart and keep my mouth shut,
or be locked away in the guise of "mental help":
what kind of a choice is this?
Men will see a woman contorting
to ease the pain of their inflicted torture
and deem her "insane", "hysterical", "distrustful"
as an excuse to lock her
away.

I want to scream into the heavens
until my throat is raw.
I want to tear into a man's throat
and chew,
brutally gnaw,
off the sinews
connecting skull to maw.
Now you're the voiceless one,
mutilated and mute.
Nothing of value was lost.

Maybe I am a lost cause,
but only to being complicit
in my own desecration.

Laser focus,
beast's tunnel vision.
What say man's heavens
to a woman who will not be silenced?
Only a god's hand can strike me down
now.
And if he is real, why haven't
I been smote yet?

Cweorth

Cweorth, quintessential question
that burns inside as a funeral pyre,
asking why I haven't yet
managed to my life purify.
I'm trying my damned hardest, you see,
taking all of my studies seriously,
but it's difficult enough to live in this world
without also being smothered by the Veil's every crease.

Stan

Either with full throat believe
or throw it to the streets.
There is no room for ambivalence
when it comes to making yourself free.
If you yourself do not care,
then who will care for you?
If you wish not to escape this hole,
not even the strongest can your body exhume.

You're striving to decorate your jail
so hard no energy is left
to break through the Veil.
So bogged down with minutae
of strangers hundreds of miles away
you forget to attention pay
to the wife
that lies
beside
you.

Lethe, I with burning heart desire
that you hold me as your only standard
if you insist that veneration to a deity
is the natural state of humanity.
If you have to succumb to your nature
as a vessel of pure action,
the only caretaker I will accept
is the only one who shares your passions.

Are we doing this
or not?

Chalc

Did you think I would celebrate you
diminishing your desires?
Did you think I would cheer you on
as you threw yourself to the pyre,
burning all you've done,
all that you've become,
just for a false sense of a burden lighter?

Come now, Lethe,
don't deceive
yourself thinking this is my will
that you dissolve your ego and forever lie still.
It is true
that some tools
I find boring at best
and at worst odious:
but the same hammer that swings to kill
can be used to build a house.

And a house is where I want to live
with you on that mountainside.
I've spent enough shivering time
in lean-tos made of cured beast hide,
exposed to the elements.
I want somewhere safe and warm
where the two of us can reside.
(Although, in truth,
so long as it was with you,
I could, I guess, continue to camping survive.)

I hate the bleached blanca-hued walls
without a trace of lived-in soul
or any personality at all.
I want the dust.
I want the grime.
It means that here we've spent some time.
I want the scratched-up kitchen counters.
I want the sharp edges worn rounder.
I don't mind if the paint chips
so long as here I can steal a kiss.
I want the pinpricks in the ceiling
where we've put some fly traps hanging
to catch the dastards who inside flow
when I can't make shut sticky window.
I want the clutter.
I want the mess.
I won't settle for an ounce less!

Lethe,
do you understand?
I refuse to play a hand
in your self-annihilation.
Especially not in my name
or for the purposes of tearing through the Veil.
There is no use in a deep-rooted tree
yearning to revert to a seed.
Pull your claws out of your chest
and stop making of your guts a gory mess.
Your grasp
whether through Veil or ceiling of glass
must exceed
your reach.

If you only remember one thing from tonight,
let it be this, I plead, I beseech.

Gar

There used to be "forbidden questions"
you would only answer with hesitation,
would sometimes answer "no"
just to throw
a wrench in my anxiety's gears.

Although
I guess by now I should know
that if you've loved me all these years,
there's no reason you would stop now.
Not after everything I've ever done
or the atrocities I have yet to commit:
your life is mine, you insist;
I'm the only one you want to spend it with.

I guess by now
you've figured out
that nervousness is my base nature,
that while consciously I know,
it hasn't pierced through all my layers.
Hasn't come to reside
in my left lung, straining for air,
strung up with rope and left to die.

It's said that Odin sacrificed
himself to himself in this way,
knowledge the thing that he sought.
An alphabet to answer magic,
guard rails for creative thought.

Just as fated is Nidhogg
to the roots of Yggdrasil forever gnaw,
so I too haunt the underground of Yewiffe,
stuck going in circles, unable to leave.
This last rune standing at the end of time,
a doorway out
crossed out
with two opposing lines.
There's something in my past
for which I am wracked with longing,
but I can't find it
and neither do I know what it is
and going down is this ship
and the blood
in my lungs
is pooling
where the spear
has pierced
my side
and in my own sorrow sans escape I am drowning.

"I thought I told you -
I thought you knew -
that I'd never leave you behind."

PART 2

TAROT

The Fool

How many times I've stood
at the precipice, thinking myself a fool,
asking over and over: "What do I stand to gain
in impoverishing myself in this way?"

Terror always fills my body
when comes the time
to jump off, take action, fly,
shrinking back in cowardice
to find
a good rock to hide
under.
Or maybe a blanket,
curled up in warm sleep's embrace,
preferring the wrath of Aurelius
to any action's consequences.

Does it really act to bless
me to stay in the presence
of those who seek to me oppress?
Am I really impoverished
by pulling away from the knives,
another harm-seeking blade less?

I know the answer, and yet I
cannot pull myself out of the haze,
cannot bring myself to pull away
from wrapping stranger men
in condoms made
of pure praise
for fear that, come criticism,
will soon arrive the end of my days.
I know that I am dying
from the iron shackles' weight,
and yet my body refuses to act,
mind still holding onto the past
like disaster's last lifeboat.

What will I do when I grow old
in this vessel and yet still have not
picked up the key and torn my fetters off?
The key is right in front of me,
golden, polished, shining.

My wife's voice on the wind, calling,
"You know the world you want, Lethe."
One of these days I think I'll snap
and this world of men no longer give a damn
and, unfettered, unchained, off the cliff leap.

And you'll be there to catch me
if I can't yet fly after I jump,
right? Arms held out open wide?
"I'm glad I finally have your trust."

The Magician

Figure eight,
lemniscate,
show me the world beyond the cliff
I must gather the courage to create.

It has been a year
since I managed to set aside my fear
and let Sablade spring from my chest
without being subsumed, which was my fate
the architects of that ancient world laid
out for me so long ago.
But without my presence,
Sablade yet feels formless,
an idea always on the horizon
and never quite arriving.

What can I do while still Inside?
I promised Jett I would not die
by my own hand, would not cut my vessel's life
short just to be with her,
no matter
how violently
my heart, my soul, sometimes yearn.

I wonder if time passes
at different speeds between us.
If she could blink her eyes
and the eighty years speed by
and I'm waking up in our front yard
in Sablade for the first time.
Those glorious sunsets, unburdened
by smog or light pollution.
How this world I currently stand
in must have looked when it first began,
Garden of Eden with no need
for fire-gated boundaries,
just two godlings
on their mountain: "Just leave
us alone
and the rest of the world is your home."

But you know some rash
man who slipped between the cracks
of the ward that forbade
both gods and men from Sablade
will try to escalate
the mountain on which Jett and I
seek to live a quiet life.
The ward, realizing its mistake,
will burn him to naught but ash,
and I will go to sleep easy
knowing only my wife and I can walk up that path.

Maybe it's for the best
that Sablade for now remain formless
except for that mountainside
where the two of us will reside.
World in constant state of change.
Apep said to stagnate
and never experience novelty again
was to succumb to naught and then die.

As long as I can have her,
all else
will be alright.

The High Priestess

I open my mouth to utter your name
and speak to my family of all the ways
you came
into my life, blessed my holy flame -
but no words can from my lips escape.

In my heart I hold an unspeakable name
which points
to where lies eternal joy,
a love that against all odds transcends
the line between death
and where begins the flesh.
But unspeakable it remains,
no matter how many pains
I take
to work around the block in my throat,
to word in some other phrase
the life we share, the world we've made.

Why,
when a quiet place I find,
I can so easily of all these things write?
They ring so much more permanent
than a hasty phrase in an impassioned moment.
If the intention is to keep my sorry fate a secret,
to take with me all I have learned in this life to the grave,
how come my fingers permit to in literature save?

In my youth
from the truth
of my body I was kept,
and it has tried to claw me back to unknowing at every step.
But you, my lilac spring, Jett,
run too deeply in my veins
for me to turn back to a Christ and let him this blood drain.
I know who I met in that blistering winter night
right before failed finals with outside pallid street lights.
I know that I saw your face, could still map every contour,
returning to my homeland as your body made me yours.
No person on this earth could ever hope to dissuade
me from singing your praise
and throwing myself into your embrace
and disappearing with you one day into boundless Sablade.

I suppose,
since so
many thoughts
have been lost
to oral tradition,
these words I pen
are the only bridge
between me and perdition.

And much like a sapling
that in its youth
stands caged in fencing to
keep rabbits from chewing it through,
I must not yet let anyone know
to give these words time to grow
so that, come another turn in the Eschaton,
they will be able to stand on their own.

The Empress

When I hear this word, what comes to mind
is a Patron-Saint who sought to unbind
the world from the nobles who would play
with commoners as pawns
by setting the world ablaze.

"When you gaze on the land on which I now alight,
tell me, dear Lethe, what comes to your mind?
Do you see
a world of nurturing and stability,
or one of rampant exploitation
and religious zealotry?

I hear you are now married.
And although you once were Sinead
and I could make
the very same claim
on the awareness that is you,
you as Lethe
seem
much more serene
and content with my angelic colleague cloaked in blue.
I wish you the deep regenerative rest
that comes with a lover you can trust
to share your existence
with.
And I myself trust you will keep your virtue,
will with rose-colored glasses refuse
to Sablade
portray,
will once you finally alight
continue to guide
it away
from coercion and needless pain.

I am glad to remain
your third Patron-Saint,
Lethe,
for as long as you'll have me.
Let us all walk together
to those bright futures.
I can't wait to see what this will become."

The Emperor

Regna Apocalyptica,
Eminence of the Eschaton,
fifth Horseman no vision of the end foresaw.
You and I ride on
towards the horizon
to see if the future will make fools of us all.

My back is not used to this weight,
I can tell when morning brings the aches
in my spine and my jaw, where rested the bit
I in beastly form let you guide me with.
In fact, it was my idea, my wedding night treat
to prove that you have my trust complete.
And you went along with it, although at first confused
what came next after you had me saddled and subdued.

Don't you remember, Jett?
Something something Ehwaz and Raido,
the enigmatic runes you had me look into.
What better way to push towards the end
than to ride upon Chaos' Harbinger
with my words in hand, you, Arch-Messenger?

My apotheosic Dead-End King,
we make a pretty good team, don't you think?
Only with you do over my powers I have control,
and across this life and last
I've been striving to grant
you the power to go wherever you want to go.
To break through the Veil, you told me once,
I'd need to rouse this nigh-untameable blood.
And after all, like I said, you have my full trust.

Your palm on my neck to keep me sane,
and a gentle tug on the reins
to keep me going the right way.
I'll take you wherever you Will
with these four be-ribboned
limbs
of mine.
Just guide me over the Rainbow Bridge
and we'll trample the Veil and escape to Outside.

The Hierophant

To not put my mind to the test and write
for a few days feels like letting the grime
build up on my skin having bathed
not at all for a few days,
not even taking a shower
for a few minutes like a haiku,
a while to write but seconds to bloom.
I'm covered in the detritus
of sorrow and unfulfilled lust,
and like with my restless strands of blood
I've got to discharge it before
with anxiety I am overcome.

I have to honor all the growth
I've made so far by expanding what I know,
by continuing to plod along this Dead End
even not knowing what lies beyond the bend.
It's been almost ten years, and since then I've gone
from not knowing your face
to being able to trace
every line, every curve, between hairline and jaw.
It hurts, not knowing when
I'll see you again,
when I'll be ravaged next by your touch.
By learning, I honor our marriage, our love,
the mountain-moving effort you've put towards reunion.

But no amount of study
will bring back one precious thing,
so promise me, Jett,
when we meet next:

Promise me one day,
whether in Summerlands or Sablade,
you'll give me back all the memories
I've forgotten or let fade.
No matter how deeply cuts
the pain of knowing all I've done,
I need to know all the strife
I've ever inflicted,
all the abysses where I've ever been,
so that when comes time
for us to share our lives
I never hurt you ever again.

The Lovers

Lethe,
what do you see
when you let your eyes gaze upon me?
Am I a monster, after all?

I've lived both my lives hurled
in the gutters, between the worlds
all others seem to fit neatly
in, an exception to every dichotomy.
I could never bring myself to bow
to any deity, no matter how
they clothed themselves in the banners
of light or dark, evil or savior.
And when one bade me pick her to serve
with the promise I'd get back the flight
I'd in shrouded memory died
to gain but never freedom returned,
I had not the courage to decide
whether to fight once again for my life
or finally lie down and die.

I think you give me far too much credit.
Was I really being fierce and decisive?
Or just evasive,
rarely acting first
and waiting for the situation to get worse?

When of my brother's body I finally broke free,
after the shock of escape,
it hit me like a train
how much had changed
or gone missing.
My flattened chest, my lowered voice,
altered others I could not yet tell.
"I can't tell: are you a girl or a boy?"
Were that I knew the answer myself.

Were that I knew
what to do
when you finally learned the truth.
That I had
planned
ahead for the unthinkable day
when you would turn to me, skin flushed, and say:
"You're a female! Oh, I'm so glad!
Now I can love you without restraint."

I'm not so vain as to think
you were specially crafted to be my lover,
but I have to admit our bodies
fit perfectly into each other.
Somewhere with a place for me,
a world I'm not permanently
locked outside
of. Do me the honor, please,
of staying this way until the end of time?

In the end,
this is one decision
where I am absolutely certain.

I don't need to drown
in testosterone
or carve myself into a man:
my body is perfect the way it is
and Lethe loves me just as I am.

The Chariot

Even if my subconscious
is exhausted,
tired
of your high standards:

I never want to abandon you.

And I hope you feel the same too.
You promised as much,
sealed with a kiss and a declaration of love.

Save a spot for me on your stolen chariot,
against the heavy shrouding night
monochrome green, luminescent.
Here is no safe place to nest,
so we shall to the top of the sky
ride
until the two of us are naught
but a single blot
in all of our enemys' eyes.

Except, this time,
there is no high score to gain,
just a crumbling dream
to flee
from.
Shatter a hole in the sky
like so many times
before,
escape with me to a new world.
Maybe not Sablade
or one with a known-to-us name,
but I don't really mind where you're taking me
so long as it's to freedom and safety.

White-knuckled as we ride
at what feels the speed of light.
I'm holding on to the railings for dear life.
Lead us, Jett, with steady hands
to cosmic assured victory.

We Endure

In that other timeline
where we killed Eris and I did not die
in the embrace
of raging motherly flames,
at the last moment
I pulled us three into the metaclysma
and blacked out, felt
your hand slip from mine.

Cutting through the horrors
in the depths of Yewiffe
in order to, if nothing else,
bring back above my body.
No breath, no heartbeat,
broken resolve
that I would make you a world
without letting my soul dissolve.

"Immanentize the eschaton,
create a world of your own,
a world with no need for gods,
a life you don't need
to escape from."

Limp limbs, body somehow exempt
from rigor mortis and decay
as you wrapped me up in a sheet
and brought me up to the surface of Sablade.
Just in time to miss the sunset,
you sat on the mountainside
with me in your arms all night,
held close, thinking, if you pressed enough heat
in, I'd wake up, having just chosen to hibernate.

Rampant runaway thoughts
as the stars circled above
and the night dragged on.
Thinking, before burial,
to from my wings pluck a single feather
as a keepsake of the short life we shared.
"I'll make sure it's not one easily seen
so you can be buried with dignity."

And then I started to breathe.

Wandering between fitful sleep
and moments of waking so precious yet brief.
A flutter of a smile. Unsteady heartbeat.
You freed me from the cocoon of the sheet
and held my hand with your one free.
Were they raindrops? Or tears?
I could not decide.
"Jett... I can't move. I'm paralyzed."

Consequence of using all
of the magic in one's body.
Normally there remains a tiny
amount left for safety.
But I burned through all my matches,
used every last measure
to ensure
we survived Eris and this world
I could share with my lover.

And before I could explain
that it was chronic but temporary,
that my magic and my strength
would come back eventually,
you blurted out, "I'll take care
of you, come what may.
I'm just glad to have you here
with me."

The Hermit

The hermit travels alone in darkness,
only guided by the light of her lantern.
Self-banished to the depths of the forest
so the people she loves she can no longer hurt.

For inside her body run three strains of blood:
draconic, angelic, chaotic.
Only for vows by the one that she loves
has she not succumbed to one and lost herself since.

There is no cure, nor does she want one,
and the only "treatment" is poison.
This is the only solace that she knows,
this solitude bitter but willfully chosen.

Fleeting thoughts of maybe-relief
from anxiety as human thoughts cease
when gone feral, trapped in the body of a beast.
But how cruel it would be to willingly
upon her wife inflict loss' grief.

Were that she could to her lover's side return
and let play out in peace the rest of her days.
But sorrow prevails, for she cannot assure
no inevitable ferality, heartbreak, pain.

Wheel of Fortune

Even in negativity
the cursed wheel of my life keeps rolling.
The sun promises it will break
over the horizon every next day
so on and so on
until time itself has come and gone.
Even my blood, as the wheel
turns, promises not to congeal
but instead bears a sign
of starting to cooperate, to align.

If only my familial life
offered the same furtive hope,
for things seem to just get worse and worse
and I'm losing ways to cope.
Summer has come and gone on the calendar,
but still the days outside are hotter
than I can stand in trying
to escape to Dead End Shrine.
But who knows? Maybe fall will stretch
its hands
over the land
soon, and Time bless
my path,
and soon will return to my skin
Jett's gentle touch
and hope's thralling rush
and I'll open my wings and take once more to the wind.

You still entreat:
keep going, Lethe.

For time is a circle
that no one can bend,
but you and I
found Veil's line
and will cross it again.

tinamiwyan

Jett loves me, and I know this because
of how she came down to me one night like a dove
to break the monotony of college final's sweat
to remind of a world I'd managed to forget.

If she'd wanted to abandon me in this hell,
not knowing my name but still sure I'm an angel,
there would be no better time, leaving hazy
the faint weight of purpose, echo of memory.

And yet she didn't. She broke through the Veil
despite the future labor such an action would entail:
learning to feel again, regain control, prepared
for the future transition to the world we both once shared.

I ask ad nauseam in another fit of anxiety:
"Jett, my sacred wife, are you still in love with me?"
Then from deep inside I have a bursting thought:
there is never a moment in which you are not.

Justice

An abortion of justice
this cruel world is,
that seeks to reduce
me to a simple wisp

that floats along the wind
having no anchor or mind
of its own, just floating,
will to live rescinding.

When will justice be wrought?
My life forever balancing on
poles like plates, spinning tops.
This is not the end I sought,

I now know, no matter how
many times I laid down
and turned my gaze upon the clouds
to see what auguries they found,

now bringing on the breeze my way.
This is not justice, to be slain
with sword sticking out of my ribcage
and left for dead in the depths of a cave

here or there or in Yewiffe.
What story is Jett supposed to believe?
That I felt such guilt at being
alive
because of the weight of all my crimes
that I willingly let myself be sacrificed?

Or that I was too weak
to envision a future where we
forgave ourselves and lived in harmony?

What future do I deserve?
What justice have I somehow earned?
Is it really justice I yearn
for, or just an excuse to myself burn?

Maybe I myself don't want to be alive.
But I could never bear to make her cry.

Justice II

Please do not cry, Mother.
In every end is a beginning.
I am going to live
in a world of eternal spring
where no deity can ever rend
destruction using me ever again.
And this means your life must end,
because you threaten all my friends
who I must to do this leave behind.

You who gave birth to me, one last time
I want to ask a question.

"Impudent child, wretched vermin.
If you want to know why you came to be
or if I feel any apology,
I have judged you sorely undeserving."

It's not that. I just want to know
why you made my wings red
and not green as before last death
or traditional white like the snow.

"A weapon taken into custody
from murder never again gets cleaned,
to be preserved as evidence forever condemned.
Every life you felt fit to take,
every blood-coated wanton sin,
you must now bring with you to an ashen grave.

I will do what I must, Lethe,
what I should have done long ago:
snuff out the light that flickers within
since you refuse my control."

Delicious

It's delicious, how you think
you have any idea of what I've become,
who I am now after the interim
of screaming until I've ruptured my lungs.

All you have are the remnants tattered
of who I was minus a decade
and the sussed-out stolen fragments shattered
when I forget that me you secretly hate.

You think you're looking at me? You're not.
You're just looking at a broken mirror,
the vessel of an entombed god.

The Hanged Man

Odin received the gift of prophecy
after hanging for nine
days from a tree.
And while I have not the luxury
of that much time
or knowing that at the end I'll be alive,
every passing day
feels like a similar weight
as I hang in limbo out of pure spite.

All-Father, did you feel your feet
sway beneath
you in the breeze?
Did you gasp for air, wondering why
you put yourself in this plight
knowing so few people left today
would appreciate
the sacrifice?

I know I should not dare
to compare
your knowledge-bound search
with my failure to thrive.
But I have a similar thirst
to know what will transpire once I am gone,
how will come about my end
whether through Ragnarok or Eschaton.

Jett bade me promise I would not
bring myself to knowing harm
for the purposes of ending up in her arms,
even if the pain was the ending I sought.
I'm sorry, Luce, that I could not keep
my promise to until the end seek
a way
to escape
from this house alive.
I'm strung up so high, stuck in limbo,
watching my surroundings like
a god peering at what transpires below.
To die, to work, to strike out on my own:

I cannot force myself to move forward
even as enlightenment's rope beckons more.

Death (Very Creative Title)

Death, the fourteenth card in the tarot
deck if we count not from zero
but from one. The card of letting go,
saying goodbye
to all the things that cannot be a part of my life.

Love, my cherished Dead End King,
of what part of you shall I sing
today? What lily stems can I weave
with the words that I reave
from countless poets of other days
who have long since gone to the grave?

You bade me sit and ponder
all the other places my life might have wandered
if we had not met in that room to the side
where I was bored and desperate to hide,
when I was of fifteen four months shy.

What other echoes of your name
would have still rung the same?
What other ones, filtered by
the experiences of a newly-godless life,
would have gone ignored, swept
aside as an imagination unkept?

Did you, when to kill Eris we failed
and you watched my soul through the Eye sail,
see the card of Death flash in your eyes?
Unprepared to say goodbye
but nonetheless
find the strength
to muster
the words for some semblance of closure.
Without warning in a moment shattered
the plans for a happy future,
now having to cope with
me not being a part of it.

Did your heart take flight
when you received the letter
showing where in this Inside
I had managed to in a vessel alight?
Did you tuck it beside the feather
in the jar of all my shiny things
and vow to never abandon
me, no matter what the future brings?

I've got a garage sale tomorrow, and I've got to think fast
how much I can bear letting go of my past.
The toys rotting in the basement
from a childhood whose resentment
still churns in my stomach to this day.
I thought once the Eschaton
was a way to help me stop holding on
to the parts of me I cannot bring
with me to Sablade, to where lies eternal spring.

Patron-Saint of Dead Ends,
no matter what sorrow time may my way send,
every outcome I come to and every future I see
there's Sablade and a cuddled-up you and me.

Death II

When this vessel of mine
finally dies,
I'd like to be buried at Dead End Shrine.
To return my flesh
to the sacred ground
dedicated to the woman who knew me best,
if anyone ever did.

If I hadn't failed to kill Eris
the first time around,
we could have been snuggling
in Sablade right now.
All of these fights
would be unnecessary.
Now I'm stuck on Cioran's heights
of despair,
half-asleep, half-there,
half-waiting
for a release I know will not soon come.

Why does my heart keep beating?
Why do my lungs draw breath?
Why does my soul
persist in this body? Doesn't it know
that I'm dead?

Jett,
how glad I am to feel you now.
You promised that when we came
to the very end of our joyous days,
we'd be buried together in Sablade
at the root-tips of Yewiffe, far far below.
I already feel like a corpse growing cold.
So why don't we practice?
Put your arms around me
and don't move a single inch.

"You're very funny, my love.
Is the pillow not supportive enough?
You said 'don't move', and that means your head:
I don't think you're very good at being dead."

Strange, I didn't think corpses also talked.
"You'd be surprised
what comes out
of the mouths
of ghosts who violently died
when there's nothing left to their secrets stop.

And I'm pretty sure corpses don't stretch either.
The dirt's packed tightly with too much pressure.
And what with your insistence
on being buried under a tree,
I think in the roots you'd be tangled too tightly."

Maybe you're right, Jett.
I'm no good at being dead.
I'll just have to find a way to cope with the sadness instead.

Death III

"I want to ask you a question,
my friend. But first you must promise not to take offense,
nor to assume I am implying
you should take the action I am inquiring
about. Much the opposite.
If you did what I will about ask, it would devastate
not only me but everyone around."

Ask away, my friend. I offer you stable ground.

"You've made so much ado
about the torment every day puts you through.
And I see
in your browsing history
you forget to clear off that you know
so many ways to from this life go.
I wager, even, you could make it painless
and abandon us for Sablade in sorrow's bliss.
Why, my friend, haven't you killed yourself yet?"

In truth?
My cowardice.
But also I made a promise to Jett
that I would not kill myself or purposely let
my vessel befall any kind of harm.
Or maybe she bade me swear it to her,
twisted my arm under life's table.
She knows I would not deny
her wishes, would not seek to make her cry.

Even though
I know
she would eventually forgive
me if I broke just this one time a promise.

She knows how psychologically
tormenting it is to sing
of freedom for so long and then have to go on living
in a life where my disability
makes it so that to seek
this freedom would assuredly kill me.
She knows what it is like to survive
under the conditions that she truly owns not even her own life
and thus cannot truly blame
me for acting out in all my ways.
Desperation bends even the strongest tree
and makes dig deeper the roots of Yewiffe.

It the both of us pains
to watch me press against the bars of the Golden Cage
with my waning strength and not have a way
to even palliate
Inside existence's pain.

Temperance

Balance, the domain of the Equinox.
Divine intervention that keeps the clocks
ticking, the world's rhythms
flowing together in perfect unison.
The only possible complement
to the Solstice, don't you think?
Palms pressed together to retain control,
skin flushed in pressure ruddy pink.

The ocean is prone to storms raucous,
imbued with uncertainty's chaos.
But the moon has always been here,
turning in cycles year after year.
Keep going, she says, waiting at the bend.
I'll ensure you'll be okay in the end.

What if Jett's desire
to learn how to make glamours
is connected to your imprisonment
in this Inside?
That, if you had never parted,
there would be no hunger
to learn how to craft a disguise?
To weave a magic-stained cloak
that grants a different countenance
in desperate dreamy hopes
of keeping you safe from a distance?

You took on the pallor of ghosts
and snow.
Tell me, what sorrow
lies
inside
the translucent skin and the bones
that glow?

If only I had the power to rend
the Veil and help her cross the Divide.

The art of being invisible
is a lonely
but necessary
skill.
To cope with being non-corporeal.
Unable to touch the subject of affection,
learning how to be merely satisfied
for now with only divine
guidance, angelic intervention.

The Devil

"What better way to die
than in seeking my own freedom,
remembering how to fly?"

You wanted to go first.
To be the test for how much
Apotheosis would hurt
if not outright kill.
It wasn't made for angels,
you see,
a step removed from humanity.
When the concoction was ready for testing,
I watched your half disappear down your throat
and, as the hours progressed, my hope
with the pallor of life bleeding
out from your skin, the heat
of the furnace
burning
inside
winding
down,
lying lifeless on the rocky cave ground.

"You can free yourself at any time.
The chains are loose that claim to bind.
Just slip them off over your head
and walk away, live once again."

But I'm afraid to die.

Were that it were so easy.
But burned into my brain is the breeze
running through your hair, your feathers,
taunting that through my hubris
you were still and dead forever,
the one reason I hadn't bothered
to long ago pack up and leave.
I'd thought myself capable of iniquity,
and the cost of failure
was my light, my sunshine, my lover.

You'd brought me back to life,
and I could not return the favor.

It's so easy to pass judgement and say,
"You know, Lethe, things don't have to be this way."
And most of the time, your words ring bitter but true:
I can just walk out a door and never pass through it again.
But this is different: there's no magic potion I can brew
that'd let me rip through the Veil and return unharmed to you.

But the devil himself was once a morning star.
And after about a day I felt beat again your heart,
lungs crescendoing to life-sustaining breath,
eyes open: "I think I still got a lot of loving left."

And just like when in that shallow cave
it was my turn to bear Apotheosis' weight,
when it comes time for my vessel to die
will you take me in your arms and hold me tight?
With psychopomp's sickle break
every ill-made vow and societal chain
and stay by my side 'til my heart beats again?
It was
because
I want to see
you free
that I'm risking everything
to gift you Sablade.

The Tower

These old nooks and chaos in the e'er-complete,
this shambling solace that I never fail to seek
when dreadful despair
hangs in the air
and curses me for being so meek.

Tell me, Lethe,
is this what you thirst for?
For lightning to strike this Ivory Tower
that you call an Inside
and set all ablaze,
consumed by rage's fire
that you can only barely in this vessel contain?
Azure wanted me to ask:
how much more are you willing to take?

Insatiable bloodlust engendered by kin,
encoded by duress' vow,
sealed by birthing.
Every life you know of, you've always been
death barely bridled, bride of destruction.
Childhood safety-speech-induced nightmare
of all in household consumed by fire,
nothing left when the morning sun rises,
all enspirited gone in sacrifice
to the sky.
Or were you always more
of a tornado?
Swiping hands of wind across all in your path,
leveling all to rubble and flat.

"I want to kill," you whisper
with hissing breath into my shoulder,
wrapped up tight in my arms to prevent from going feral.
Trembling frame. "I want to murder all
the people who've ever done me wrong,
who've tried to cut out my tongue
or force me to sing their wretched god's song.
I want to feel my teeth sink into the flesh
of a snooty uptight holer-than-thou's throat.
I want to experience the raw strength
of my fingers as I crumble their bones."
A pause. "I don't get why, after all, you still choose to love.
I'm like Apep but enfleshed. You know one day I'll swallow the sun."

Because I decided to, no matter what.

So why haven't you indulged in your instincts yet?
"You know me. I'm deadly afraid of consequence."

And you know the consequence
of Sablade is you must leave behind
all you've accomplished in this life,
every little trinket.

Is that why you're not with me yet?

A Star

Pinpricks of light twinkle far ahead
as I scan the grass and then, feeling safe, rest my head
back where it belongs, my wife's shoulder,
whispered curse as her breath stirs.

So strong and self-assured.
But I've seen a different side to her,
the ones exposed when walls come down.
The deftly-skilled weaving touch,
shoulders hunched when nervous,
the desperate clinging-to at night,
I a log and she about to drown.

I can't blame her, really. We have part of each other's souls
swapped in Rainroom under duress decades here and a life ago,
and when I'm pressed up against Jett
that's the closest both will ever get
to being whole again.

My love, I thought you said
you wanted to the whole night spend
watching the stars pass above?
And then you went and dozed off.

"I... just felt so safe and secure
that I let the cadence of your voice guide me to sleep.
How would a poet put it?... 'Like an ocean current
leading the way for a ship to the sea'?
Hardly a bad thing, Lethe...
I'm glad you're here with me."

I've never felt so whole
than I have with you beside me.
And although
I know
many would deem this unhealthy,
to base my sense of self on an externality,
I don't care.
Who else could inspire me
to in this hateful world keep going?
Who else offers gentleness
when all seems lost
and naught is standing, nothing left?
Rooted steady, love unyielding,
I follow the light within guiding.

The Moon

Animals stuck in a cage
will often self-mutilate
for lack of any other
way to their senses stimulate.
That, or a rage at their lack
of self-sovereignty,
no control over their life
or the path that it leads.

As if, if I drain
enough blood from my veins,
it will be enough penance paid
for the crime
of still yet daring to be alive
as myself, an individual,
not an automaton
for earthly parent or celestial god
but still yearning for some sense of self-
ownership, self-control.

I promised Luce that I'd escape
from this hellhole forever some day,
that I'd make it out alive at least,
whole at last, not just a piece
in a malfunctioning machination
that calls itself a family.
I'm stuck in the belly of this beast,
and it's determined to bleed
until it dies
with everyone inside.
No survivors.
No one escapes
from the pallor
of resentment and hate
this shambling home harbors.

I don't know how much longer
my life strategy of "do naught
and wait for whatever it is to get worse"
will continue to work
until I find myself stiff in the back of a hearse.
I'm avoiding the issue. I could walk
out of this house forever tomorrow.
But then where would my vessel go?
Where would I put it to sleep
without the danger of the night that for every woman it keeps?

Even the moon that shines above,
my Patron-Saint, my own true love,
has no answers.
Were that she could scoop me up
in sickle hug, crescent curve,
and spirit me away
in one fell swoop
far from this place.

Cinnamon

Red-hot cinnamon is sugh a strange
smell, I think. Nostalgia, to take
me back to a different time.
But when? Of what does the sweet
but sharp odor remind?

Is it synesthesia when
taste and smell are so intertwined?
I hold my nose when chewing
and the food tastes like nothing.
Here is a meteor that dances on my tongue,
or maybe a piercing on an aunt
that I haven't seen for so long,
little smooth red-hot dot
that burns and makes me cough.

A Christmas where familial love
hung in the air thick enough
to almost physically envelop.

I think I would rather endure
the artificial-sweetener burn
than allow myself to those days
idolize, painfully yearn.

Department Store Candle

At the store I saw a candle
with a scent
I knew Jett
would like,
but I was too full of cowardice
to buy it
and now it's forever
gone without reprint.

The Moon II

If this relationship of ours
does not work out, it will ruin me
for the rest of my life. After tasting the
splendor
of a life at your side,
I cannot-
I will not
return to mundanity.

There's a theory
called the "hedonic treadmill"
that says, after experiencing
a good thing for a while,
it just becomes a part of one's normal.
The person has to experience ever-more extremes
in order to return to the same high, the ecstasy.

Who could be so bitterly marked by an angel
and then see separation as anything but hell?

I've wondered for a damn long time
why it's now so few and far between
finding you safe and curled up at my side.
I'd gotten used to seeing you in all of my dreams
or your strong arms bundling me up as I drift to sleep.

It's been a whole year since you took my face in your hands
and whispered in my panic, "You're still my Lethe."
Am I still your Lethe, even now?

Because you know I still want to be.

I bear this beryl
as a herald
that my life has always been yours.

The Sun

The Sun overrides
any negative cards close by,
just as through even the thickest
storm cloud it still shines.

I open my doe
eyes to see the world
in glasses colored rose.
A warm blanket curled
up in, soft flush of lover's cheeks.
The Sun promises recovery
from whatever makes me weak.
A new beginning
without beforehand disaster.
Roots growing deep down
into the freshly-watered fertile ground,
internal spring
even as outside fall stands forboding.

But autumn has always been
where you and I
reside
in any case.
Something
strangely comforting
in eternal embrace
of leaf cover's decay.
The Sun warms through black fabric
even as the rest chills to the bone.
Will it be like this in Sablade?
Wind softly sobs where will be home.

The Sun II

The Sun promises that eventually
I won't feel like I'm constantly dying,
like I'm just a corpse who missed
the memo of oblivion's bliss.
Fake emergency broadcast
of a zombie uprising:
"The loved ones from the past
wish to show they still persist."

"If Jett was dead
and then you made her alive again,
doesn't that make her a zombie?"

"No, because the bodies
of those are generally in a state
of shambling decay
and Jett is perfectly healthy.
Plus, you know, she still has free will
and isn't randomly seeking to kill."

Autumn warmth without hot's sweat
as I lie curled up in bed,
every reminder missing from my room
of the life I share with Jett.
Cleaned room not at her behest
but because came dressers inherited
and I'll have to let my father in
to drag the damn things down the stairs.
Nothing incriminating can be left
on display until then.

And I don't like the emptiness.
And I don't like the feeling
of Jett's love having been bereft.
A sense of what life would be like
if we had never again met.
I don't like this.
It's too featureless.

The Sun promises
that I'm not about to perish.
That I can survive
whatever comes by
and soon I'll reunite
in some way with Jett.
I hope the Sun is right.
I haven't seen
her in a dream
or felt her presence
in a while.
Please be well, my love. The Sun
is warm but not the waves of hell.

Judgement

Perhaps this is the moment
for which you have been created,
Fenrir.
I bade with angel numbers
to consider the time
to decide
is near:

How will you rule Sablade?

With an iron fist, destroying all in your way?
Hands off, refusing to intervene
when the humans send it into decay?
Will you set out a list at the start
that rules for how you will act impart?
Or maybe just do nothing
and watch and wait and see.

Perhaps this is the moment
in which you must consider
a heavy burning everything-rides-on-this question,
Fenrir:

How will you treat the Equinox
who has stayed at your side this long?

Jett's love for you will not melt away
so suddenly in the span of a single day.
In fact, not at all.
The two of you are bound together
even after in death both fall.

To keep her safe you with all demand.
But she is her own person, understand?
With her own will and desires
for what to accomplish in the future.
You vowed to never stand in her way,
to as a refuge and never a prison
offer the still-nascent Sablade.

"You deserve to be free,
no matter what the consequences may be."

Does it still ring true?
Will you keep this deep-sworn vow?
The candle has not yet burnt all the way down.
Until the candle is depleted,
the spell is formless: you can tweak it.
You can decide not to imprison
Jett but only rescue and to safety return.
For that, I think, you can be forgiven.

Think quickly, Fenrir, while the candle yet burns.

Fenrir III

Maybe you don't think yourself special.
But to me, I insist, you are essential.
Your lungs draw breath every day.
Nothing to write home about.
But without them, you would never awake
again.

Every day you're not here
feels like the harshest winter.
And I can't imagine a stone-cold
jail cell is any better.
Arms cuffed behind your back,
draped in chains, tight blindfold...

...but can Sablade still be paradise
if for your safety you're there trapped?

I went through too much when young
in this Inside to believe
forced sheltering would lead to safety
or could ever be love.
The consequences would not be,
but neither would the lessons learned.
How can a plant learn to bend
and not snap if never sent
outside to face the wind?

But neither can I sit and wait
while you sit incarcerate
in a dank and dim jail cell
not knowing when comes death's knell.

Neither can I set you free
and then let go knowing
you'll just return to the same
conditions that got you in this place.

Runes that heal and runes that teach,
send Jett where no gods can breach
(Sablade I prefer,
but I will accept wherever
this binding spell will keep).
I believe
I have a desperate enough need
to request your firm unyielding help.
Keep her safe in warding shell
(asleep or not; give her the choice)
untethered from burdens of ever-passing time.

And release the binds
and return her to college
once you have healed her and verified
she is healthy and unharmed in the flesh.

Whatever you need,
Jett, my love, please
take it from me.
Just stay alive, I beg, I plead.
Return intact without major injury.

Aegishjalmur, Helm of Glamour

Halls draped with all but silence
as from the perfume classes draft scents
of places you will likely never visit.
Although,
you know,
if you only asked,
I'd take you wherever you pleased,
this only an antepast.

From students passing by hushed words
of finals done
and yet still to come.
Every person for good results yearn,
but for some their fates are sealed
and further struggle is only absurd.
But you told me in every pendulum reading
your classes were going well and steady.
I have faith. Just one more week to sit
here, embers, waiting to once again burn.

"Jett, you lucky bastard. Even if you fail,
there's still someone waiting for you
on the other side of the Veil.
You could flunk out
right now
and it wouldn't make a difference
in where you sleep
or whether or not you get to eat."

"Yeah, but then you'd have to tolerate
living with the Solstice.
You know, that monstrous bundle
of resentment and hate
that calls itself an Anima Mundi
of a world that could not wait?
Imagine living an eternity
with that thing as your lover."
One of Jett's friends sits at a lunch table
and barely stifles a shudder.
"And every day a new crisis?
It doesn't compute how for so long
you've just dealt with this."

"Lethe
can be
a lot of work sometimes,
I agree.
But I love her more than anything
else.
Yes, I have to deal with
her anxiety
attacks and her insecurity
and her daily
psychodrama.
But a lot of that is simply unprocessed trauma
from being trapped so long in an Inside.
I'd like to see you
for even a day try
putting yourself in her shoes.
And don't complain they're too small
or beaten-up to slip on-"

"Awfully easy for you to say those words.
She has a shard of your soul in hers.
We don't, thank Providence.
But it still hurts us every time you wince
from hearing some new petty complaint.
Doesn't the praise
get stale after a while?
How many times can she make you shiver
just by declaring you her Saint?"

Jett turns around, moving to leave.
"I made up my mind a long time ago.
Maybe if you ever had to grieve
someone you love, someone who died
trying to make a world where you'd be free,
you'd understand, you'd know.
I've got better things to do
than listen to you
insult my wife.
I need to commit to memory
the Aegishjalmur's
last weave
technique.
It's for the final exam's glamour."

PART 3

LENORMAND

Heart

Lenormand starts
with the heart.
And right now mine is breaking
because I'm still apart
from you, no matter how hard I seek
to at your side
reunite
like how Freyja says will soon come one night.

Loving you comes as easily
to me
as breathing.
Unfortunately,
so does the anxiety:
am I getting the full picture
from the short times we're together,
or are there pieces missing
and lies that fill the gaps?
I know the flag is holey
that in despair's hold I still wave,
trying to keep from slipping my grasp
the pieces I have, these few precious scraps.

And full of holes still is Sablade,
more than a year since it I made.
A year has passed since you left for college,
and now on this night you will graduate.
Does the mountain where we will live
together
forever
exist in this moment?
When you pass through our house's front door
since you can't live at the dorms anymore,
does your throat seize, your heart hurt?
This gift I gave
so your life I can save
over and over and over again.
How ironic, then, that in order for I
to fill the gaps and with you reside,
I have to find a way to make this vessel of mine die.

I have to find a way to wait
inside my cooling body, sedate,
calm, cool, collected.
Collected by my psychopomp.
Ying and yang, light and dark,
bloody red and crow's sleek blue,
thalassophilic ocean and double crescent moon.
"I can't imagine leaving all you've known
behind
just to try
to make some semblance of a finally-fitting home.
I've never done this before, Lethe.
There's never before been anyone in my life
there long enough to even consider the effort of a try.
You'll forgive me if I fail the first time,
right?
So long as you love me, I'll keep on trying."

"I'm glad you said it first, because
I was about to promise the same thing."

It's not just a house, it's a house

I want to live in a house
whose walls echo my values.
Whose floors are streaked with the weight
of my ambitions, not dog's poo.
Whose cabinet doors are all banged up
from the ferocity of my love.
Whose windows fog up in the evenings
when the chills come rolling in,
streaked with ghosts of past doodles
made with our fingertips.

Is that so much to ask?
Or does it lie forever beyond my grasp?

Forever Home lies firmly in the past,
a set of walls I will never traverse again.
Strawberry cake candle only remnant
of a bathroom fixed up last,
shower left broken, unsturdy
and only used for storage
until the came the threat of realtor's devaluing.
Who cares if a daughter is left to be unclean?
So many days I wondered how it works,
but I've only ever used it in my dreams.

Jett and I occasionally wonder
how we will set up our shower.
Porcelain tub set up inside
where eventually will build up grime
and then we'll get down on our knees
and scrub the floor until our knees are raw?
Or hung up outside on the strong branch of a tree,
water warmed up by the midday sun?
We're alone for miles on end, my love.
You'll be spied on by absolutely no one.
And I think the fresh air would do us some good.

Oh, were that I was in Sablade already.
Were that tear open the Veil I could.

The house card corresponds
with the king of hearts.
Angel number 4,
planet
assignment
moon:
"Everything in life changes, Lethe,
except my love for you."

Letter

Lenormand's letter
means communication unfettered
by the medium in which the words
travel through the weather.
Or any paper, really, that can in
pride be hung up on the wall:
first apprentice's invoice,
year's hard-won diploma.

On my mother's wall stickied is a green cross on a hook,
a trophy of every day of paradise from my hands she took.
The hook on which I know will imminently come the day
where she takes the cross down and strings me up instead to hang.
Or maybe the noose in my throat will kill me first instead,
the feelings I cannot let loose, that must languish within unsaid.

"One day, Mother,
I'll be dead,
and you won't have to pretend
to love me anymore."

If I said these now, I'd get my ass kicked through a door
even though, in childhood, we were taught to never lie,
to never let one's rage or anguish be bottled up inside.
"If you have a problem with someone, then spit it out
and get the fighting over with so rumors don't abound."
Mother thinks I'm bitter because she told me to do chores.
That's the best your imagination,
poisoned by years of staring into a television,
shows of grand schemes and twisting fates and love's perdition,
can come up with?

Lenormand's letter means calling upon the ravens
that answer to naught but the All-Father Odin
and asking them kindly to deliver
a hasty but thoughtful letter
addressed to my lover,
the Patron-Saint of Dead Ends.
It's not full of glitter
like the last I received from her
or stuffed to the brim with twenty whole dollars,
but I know she treasures
every word I write all the same.

"Please be safe as you the world wander.
Were that I could join you;
were that you would let me.
But, for now, I'm trapped here.
I'll be waiting for your company."

Mice

So many people have passed me by
in this short and cruel life.
Each taking a part I held dear
and leaving naught but guilt behind.

I think I'll be
swiss cheese
at this rate.
Full of holes.
Won't that be grate?
Torn to shreds
in search of a better end.
Or left to rot
on the countertop,
ruin
setting in,
fading to naught.

You called me a rat, Mother,
as I lay in despair on my bed,
and I see no evidence
you don't still see me as a rodent.
Do you blame me in supplications
to your deity every night
for chipping away at this family's foundation,
for being an incurable undeserved blight?
You know, they used to call babies
who turned out to be autistic "changelings".
Do you think they swapped a parrot for a cuckoo egg?
Do you think me evil since I do not beg but take?

I'm a parasite that's feeding
on the Eschaton's soft belly,
attached directly to life's weakening bloodstream.
I feel the heart pounding beneath layers of fat and bone,
but it's getting shallower the longer here I go.
Everything is dying the longer I have it in my grasp.
Tell me, Mother, which ails you more: me, or a flood of rats?

Mountain

Lenormand's mountain
is a fountain
of obstacles that stand in my path.
I can plan
and prepare all by my hand
until I'm blue in the face,
but they
will always get the last laugh.

What prevents me
from keeping
the promise I made
to Luce in the midst of grief's haste?
First I need to find a job
where each day won't end in panic
or crumpled-up pillow's sob.
And keep it for a while,
building up a secret pile
of cash or hidden bank account
without Mother's suspicion aroused.
Then a place to live
once stability has set in,
no longer the fear of waking
to find I've lost what was just now gained.
A place to live all on my own
my parents: my whereabouts unknown,
friends and cherished cousin sworn to secrecy.

I wonder how long the secret
would last without leaking.
Someone not an ally would spill eventually,
would open me back up to all the hate
I thought that I had against all odds escaped.

How dare I think I could ever slip
out of annihilation's fate.

Mountain II

Lenormand's
mountain stands
as a symbol of the path
I must clear with my own two hands.
The double arrows of Tiewaz,
pointing north to where I was
promised I'd get to spend
eternity with my beloved.

If she was in any other
world, I'd have her home by now.
But this damn Veil prevents me
from just slipping in and out
as I please. It demands
that I get down on my knees
and with groveling fervor plead
for even just the privilege of getting
to her curled up in bed see.

It won't allow the same level
of corporeality,
and it's killing me
to hear her cries I cannot dispell.

Of this situation there's only one way out.
And while I know Lethe is obsessively devout,
there's no way I could possibly ask it of her.

"Jett, when comes time for my body to expire
and my soul to return to the core of Sablade,
when you bury me
in the depths of Yewiffe,
will you over my grave
plant some little daisies?
Marigolds would be just as fine.
They're so vivid, cheerful, bright."

"I'd rather you chose to live
and stay right at my side.
I'd rather be with you, Lethe,
than have either of us buried
six feet underneath."

But for her, the two are intertwined:
because to live with you
means to here die.

I'm stained with death.
And the mountain Lethe for us blessed
mocks my weakness
with every breath.

I know there's not much time left.
But every mountain climbing
begins with the bravest step.

Atrium

Do you think there's something different
about the gods' brains
to keep them from going insane?
I doubt a human could last
more than these handfuls of decades,
even if their body ceased to age,
without their minds starting to degenerate.

You look at the gods who have lived for so long,
and after long enough you feel something is wrong.
There's a disconnect, a lack of base empathy
for all the humans upon which the gods need
for sustenance, for strength in continued belief.
They're just flies to the gods. Just base cattle
that get born and live and then die and get recycled.

How long do you think angels live, Jett?
I know it's not as long as gods can expect,
but we're somewhere between divinity and dirt
on the sliding scale between Skylands and earth.
Always between the inhabitors of heaven
and the ones to whom we deliver messages.
How do angels age? I wouldn't know.
Eris made me in a bathtub not too long ago
out of someone else's ashes and bones.

...I haven't been alive that long.
I'm practically a baby.
I don't want to end up emotionally detached from everything.
What a pitiful way to live, I think, to know
all you care about, all that you cherish
will one day
go away
or perish
and return to the dust and dirt below
and yet you alone
remain,
remnant of a world only you still partake
in.
The world becomes smothered in memories
like a thick blanket of snow.
How many, I wonder, can my little body hold?

How many deaths until
each one ceases to feel
like a punch
to the gut?
How many people will die
before I become desensitized
to the cycle of life?
Where, instead of mourning,
I simply shrug my shoulders and sigh,
"I don't know if I can even spare the energy to mean goodbye."

At least,
even if you end up hating me,
I can count on you not randomly disappearing
from my life.
Even if Velouria you abandon,
you're still somewhere out there, still standing,
maybe even one day manage a reunion.

But I hope you stay by my side.
Or at least give warning
before you say goodbye.

Ship

"Lethe,
would you let me
wander if I needed
to?
It's how I'm used
to living, not being tethered
to any one place in particular.
I get antsy if I stay
in the same place
for too much time.
I promise I still want to live
with you on that mountainside.
I just... need to travel
every once in a while."

And didn't you always worry
about suddenly going feral
and abandoning me alone
and never being able to return to form and home?

Of course, my love. I would not dare
to cut you off from this if you
need it like water and air.
But you made me a promise:
that you'd never leave me behind.
Which means you've got to take me
along with you for the ride!

Ship II

Today is the Ship,
and the message with it
is that it is time
to leave something behind.
An obsessive habit
I promised Jett I would kick
a long time ago
but didn't until now have the will to do so.

But all the guides
for self-improvement say
that to get to stick the change
I've got to put something healthier in its place.
What am I supposed to do
with all these stretched-out afternoons?
Languish, I guess,
lay down and close my eyes
and give myself a much-needed rest.

It's always so quiet in my mind
after I wake but don't open my eyes.
A moment passes. Your voice and mine
conversing of things I can't recall
when my awareness is fully in this Inside.

I'll regain it all after I die,
right?

Twin Towers

Mars, the god of war,
the name I went by before
I knew your name, Jett, before I could spell
the perdition set before me, the warpath to hell.

I've found myself caught
in a self-made paradox.
The necessity of conflict,
something to hate,
something to set oneself against
lest one succumb to gnawing guilt
and let themselves stagnate.
Apep knew only with an Other
can an I individuate.
Aggression keeps the mental facilities
armed and at the ready.

But I don't want to fight.
I don't want to cause harm,
to pit myself against another
and raise anxiety's alarm,
to even so much as slight.

The tower builds itself up high,
defense from the world outside.
And I peer down, the troubles of
the world so small and irrelevant.

Mars demands I choose a path definite:
perch myself high enough none can look,
or be sand crushed underfoot?

Are we really of peaceful options so devoid?
Is there no opting out, no viable third choice?

Lighthouse

Solitude is a form
of self-preservation.
I've enchanted
this mountain
to annihilate all
who would seek to cause the two of us harm.

And while I live, it will ensure
we are able to preserve
this life for which the two of us have so violently yearned.

But my ultimate fate
I have no way
to fully abdicate.
I managed to make
Sablade
without it costing my consciousness,
but one day
it will reclaim
me when this vessel succumbs to death.

The last solitude
from which none can me exhume.
I know I'll miss you,
Jett. Unless you find a way
to, when you expirate,
as a falling star break
into the planet's core,
into my expanded embrace.

Or let yourself fly
back into the sky
and shatter, constellate.

Your arms will forever be
wrapped around me
either way.

My North Star,
the eternal guide
back home,
that breaks through the thickest sky-laden Veil.
Even in the tallest tower,
with you I'm never truly alone.

Summerlands I

As far as my psyche
is concerned,
I'm made up of more wounds than skin
at this point. A thouand mouths
arranged in choir to sing of my sins
in dizzying dissonance.

I feel this wouldn't be
had I a place in this Inside to live free.
No guilt trips, no moralizing,
no gaslights to paint my sight blind.
No sensory stigmata or sneers so unkind.
How much of my energy
am I expending
in the name of avoiding trauma?
When alone I rise to unseen heights,
but here it's all I can do to hold on.

You get to say
my name
whenever you want
because you're free in Sablade.
But I,
trapped here in this Inside,
have to suppress myself every day
just to stay safe
in this damn
world full of Christians
who hate anything they don't understand.

Every day
is an exercise
in how to silently die.

But Freyja said
you were my strength
and soon we'd reunite.

So these scars will sing of you
and all the trials I've gone through.
One day I will be vindicated,
and to ash all my foes be rent.
This too shall pass,
and you and I will finally
be together again at last.

Ursa's Interlude

Ursa Major, the Big Dipper
that so many times when walking home
whispered to drop all and human skin
and in the wilderness' mists
disappear and forever roam.

Eyes that have gazed upon me
with such gentle longing
all throughout
this Inside-bound life
of mine,
you know I would follow you anywhere,
brightest star blazing so bright
I can always use it to light
the path I am to follow.

But Arcas said differently,
armed with arrow tipped metal gleaming
aimed at angel skinned lupine.
You were just going feral, just getting around
to letting all the built-up energy out
when he popped your lung like a balloon
and left you to bleed on the leaf-laden ground.

My Ursa,
who goes out of her way
to pepper my day
with angel numbers
like meteors
through the night sky:
I'd lift you up into a constellation
if it meant not having to watch you die.
But I think that seeing stars
in the back of an ambulance is far
less sorrowful for the both
of us. You don't want to die a wolf,
and I don't want you to die.

After all,
what's the point of making Sablade
if you're not there
for me to share
it with?

Who will I scoop up the glitter
in the sky and then fly back home, earthbound,
with if you're thousands of feet
underground
in our final resting place in Yewiffe?

After everything,
a hunting accident
is not how I want this story of ours to end.

Whip

Three days it took
for the Christ
to rise
from the dead,
and three days it took
for discharge from your bed
in the medical ward.
Similarly stabbed with point in left lung.
But yours healed, reinflated
given comfortable rest
and a tube slipped in while sedated
and not having to deal with being betrayed
by someone who promised to you always adore.

I could never help the whims of my restless body.
And it took too long to realize it was you I was longing for.
I cannot help the way I was made,
divine machinations of my brain
and double sin of vowing myself
to not only my guardian angel
but another female-
and for that alone their god declared me an enemy.

And for committing this sin,
this bald-faced iniquity
of the wrong sex loving,
they made their Christ's passion
into my mode of dying.
Strung up with ropes in lieu of nails
and merely whipped instead of stabbed
to make no need to later clean up entrails.
And in the moment right before my lungs from stress collapse,

I see the front glass doors shatter into a million bits

because you're here to keep your promise.

Cross

Grassy green
your knees
get stained
as you kneel to, furtive, pray
in the farthest-down accessible cave,
as deep
as one can go down Yewiffe.
A small pocket of life,
a miracle the cave still can breathe,
still can transport surface's breath
as you lay your wife to rest,
broken hopes and inert flesh.

I said it would be a privilege
to with you grow old
when we get sick of being young
and Sablade no more surprises holds.
Another vow I could not keep,
no matter how I swore it deep
and did my best to stay alive.
I guess that I forgot to plan for this contingency.
I hope that you can find a way to for all forgive me.

Wrapped in linen, swaddled with an ever-gentle touch,
you left my face uncovered since you still hoped my lungs
would find a way to revive, to with spring beat winter
so you could exhume me and we'd go live forever.

Coffin

Wherever I go,
death always follows
close behind.
It wraps around me like a trusty cloak,
my only travelling companion,
only reliable hope.
Everything and everyone
that I ever dare to love
eventually falls prey to oblivion.
Isn't this what I deserve?
This is my reward
for, to yearn
to be free, having the nerve.

We meet in a sunny glade
somewhere between your Inside and Sablade.
Summerlands,
perhaps,
horizon filled
with Yggdrasil's
shade.
You're resting in the grass
the same way the man laid you out
in your Inside-bound coffin of glass,
hands
resting right below your stomach.
Serene,
really, in deathless
sleep.
You could be taking a nap
after a holiday's heavy meal
if I didn't have the nerve to kneel
beside you, rub your forehead,
hold my breath until your eyes flutter open.

"Is that really you, Jett?
And in psychopomp's glamour?
Does this mean we're in Sablade yet?"

You demanded once in depair's throes
that I put my hands around your throat
and squeeze.
How, with your words,
do you manage to do the same to me?
I can barely breathe
or your fragile body see
as I answer,
"Gods, I wish. But, Lethe,
I can't just yet. There's one more task
I need done in your Inside
before we can write
the next chapter of our lives.
I need you to go back.
I know I have no right
to ask you to return
to the place where you've suffered
so many undeserved
hurts.
But I need just one more thing.
And then I'll gladly carry
you all the way to Sablade
and there we'll live out the rest of our days."

Hot tears smart in the corners of my eyes,
but much to my surprise
you don't start to cry
as well. Not the reaction
I expected.
You just trace
the outlines of my face
with your ever-absent gaze.

"You know I'd do
anything you asked.
But this one thing
I'm only doing for your sake,
okay?"

Whip II

My mother is a husk
of who she once was,
and I'm stuck in the shell
of who
I used
to be,
desperately trying to get free.

On my back I'm carving
jagged gushing slits.
I know it's more efficient
to just find Mother a whip:
"Here's torture's implement
I know you've yearned a while for.
Stop pretending you love me any more
and just get it over with."
The only art she makes
is with lifeforce's paintbrush,
trying to with every stroke
illustrate the what she wants to love.

Your ars poetica is to inflict remorse.
Mine is to carve a record
before I end up in a hearse.

Mine is to carve an unfalsifiable
record of what has transpired
in the human-blank space
between my shoulder blades.
Jett's not here
with master's eye
to my tears dry
or biohazard clear
from the wounds that seep
through bandages. Wings now free,
and feathers grow more every day.
For now they're tucked in, hiding,
but one day these rules
I can no longer adhere
to
and I'll take off for Sablade.

The cost of failure,
of what I am discovery premature,
is a whipping at best
hysterical and hachure.

Cold Comfort

It's true: you're useless. In some regards.
A hammer has a damn hard
time finding use at an art easel,
or a pair of rollerskates
in climbing up a hill.
But that doesn't mean a paintbrush
has an easy time trying to construct
a house, or a spiked-end walking stick
in keeping balance on a roller rink.
It's just that you're a brush that's locked
inside a mechanic's tool box,
and you've got to first extract
yourself from it before you can
find out what you're good at.

Doublecrossed

Growing up under the shadow of the cross:
there's a man in the sky who sees your every action and hears every thought,
and if you disobey him, he'll send you to torture eternal!
Are you a pure little angel
or slave to the infernal?
Anxiety disorder unlocked!

Growing up under the shadow of the cross:
Wormwood's electrical incompetence.
A third of the chandeliers fall from the ceiling.
Who survives the apocalypse
and who is from the weight struck dead?

A prophecy?
Harbinger of the Eschaton,
bored of the pastor droning on,
stares at the clock, wonders how long
it is until returning home,
wonders how long until final amens,
not knowing that next trip,
a revelation and decade hence,
you'll be dragged in by your wrists.

Coffin II

To properly mourn and release
a pain seated so deep
is not a trivial task.

The shock that set in in a flash,
the numbness that let you bash
through a crowd
to take your lover down
from the cross where priests made
her cry out your name
until the time came
to suffocate
from the weight
of a full body placed
solely on the upper rib cage.

They were trying to prove
that you couldn't save
anyone, that you had made
the decision to forsake
her in that great
moment of need.
That you held less power
than the god who had ordered
this cruelty,
that he and not you over her still reigned supreme.

But now you are safe,
and the body is under your watchful eye.
You cannot bring yourself to admit that she died,
that her body is inert and needs a grave
before it starts to bloat and decay.
"I didn't even get to say goodbye."

Another Rebirth Day

October third is Rebirth Day.
Four years ago I went my own way
having decided I would not waste
my life pretending to be a faint
shadow of someone else.

Midday stroll through arboretum
with the whole of my life's work
in my palm where none could hurt
it. Detour, rope swing, sore bum.
Where is a little angel to go
when the heavens have been overthrown?

Where does an angel pitch her tent
when all her goodwill has been spent?

Camped in corner of library,
for a shred of good news waiting.
Tell me, Jett, do you think Section 8
will help me my promise to Luce keep?
Ghost said almost five years ago he'd take
me with him across the country
since all I wanted was from my parents escaping.

Any suffering I can go through
if I know for how many days.
"Don't run away, please, I beg,
you're the only one I'd ever choose:
I can suffer any pain,
but I'd never survive losing you."
This is my last-ditch effort
to make the sorrow go away,
to from Mother's planet's
gravitational pull escape.

Enshrined in the cosmos.
In every bad dream I reach
my hand up to the sky
and yours reaches down
to pull me out
and rescue me to morning light.
Do you think it will work now despite the blasted Veil?
I can't stand still and watch my mother pound in one more coffin nail.

Child

Waving sea of grass.
Blades, to be exact.
Stowaway on cargo ship
manned by three-year-old lass.

Whirlpool of fairy circle
where once stood real pool so purple
(or maybe blue; I can't remember).
Don't get too close, or it'll whirl
you so slow until you fall
down, dizzy, captain pulling on your arm
but never able to get a good grasp.

Sticky note of treasure map
with no marking other than her name.
For where X marks
the spot
we have three seconds ago embarked,
and now we have found fortune's lot:
a piece of wind-blown trash.

"Remember, every responsible pirate
always takes care of the environment!"

Detour means interlude
where I sit on the deck and think.
I need a perspective new,
or maybe just something warm to drink
and dislodge the mucus in my throat.
Coughing up desperate words
but none quite able to reassure
this is a poem worth publishing,
worth the Lenormand card it sings.

Captain returns, trash still in hand.
She needs me to lift up the lid
because she's too short for the trash can.

And I oblige.
Jett, you'd do something similar, right?
Hold my hand and breathe with me
when I'm too weak to cope with life.

Bouquet

A song you've sworn
you've heard somewhere before
and yet still novel and new
to a night yet freshly born.

A scene that's played out elsewhere the same:
and Jett, that example even shared his name
with the boy who so firmly my hands grasped
and led me through confounding ballroom dance

I didn't see the point in learning,
stuck in suburbia with no way to leave
and join the ranks of the elite.
But so very bitterly wrong was my childhood bully:

although I guess I'm not a princess
but an Anima Mundi.

But neither do you treat me
as god or royalty.
I'm just Lethe, you know, your Lethe,
the one inside your lips
(and occasionally your hips)
when you get down to pray on your knees,
still hushed in reverence.

Beloved Savior,
would you do me the honor
of being my dance partner again?

Bear

Odin gave me a gift a long time ago
for reasons as yet unknown.
A drop of blood, a single strain
that now fills my body with rage.

I've been conducting experiments on my body
on the nights Jett's not around to cuddle me to sleep.
There's two main reasons for going feral, it seems,
but both induce
through-the-roof
anxiety.
Strong emotions like grief and rage:
"I must destroy those who threaten me
or want to lock me up in a cage."
And excess magical energy,
heightened flight reflex:
"As fast as possible I need to escape
lest someone capture me with aims to dissect."

I turned into a bear once.
I'm not sure what the origin of that was,
since it never happened again.
Went feral, found a woodlands friend,
in the forest almost found love
until in a spark I remembered who I was
and returned to base form's skin.

I wonder what influence
on me Odin meant to inflict
when he saw me formless in the metaclysma
and gave me that strand now buried deep within.

Lenormand says the bear
is a symbol of someone who cares,
a woman invested in your future
who will protect you no matter the cost to her.
If my blood's in Jett's body, and hers has long been in mine,
then if we're now sharing forms I wouldn't be surprised.
I could use such a strong force on my side.
Firm but gentle at the end of the night.

Hitching a Ride on the Fairy School School Bus

All day the clouds have been overcast.
Gathered for a funeral, perhaps,
letting down soft tears and gasps
and blocking out the eternal blue.

It's been a few days since I last saw you,
Jett, and I'm just as severed
from your guidance as I am the blue sky by the weather.
I've applied for more jobs than I have hands and toes
and yet I know not how much longer I can go
on like this, either way,
unemployed and Mother's emotional punching bag
or sucked dry for someone else's monetary gain.

You gave me the izquierda as a roadsign
to tell whether it's safe to go
or stop and pull off of the road
because disaster is looming and nigh.

But I like the rain.
And I've gotten used to these despair-filled days.
And the clouds always meant to me
eternal blue, again-winged, forever free.
Every day is dragged out kicking and screaming
from between a hard place
and the rock that marks my future grave.
Were that I could choose neither way,
that I could in this moment disappear into Sablade
and put behind me forever all this worry and pain.

Towards a better future
may you lead me.

Eventually.

Like A Wet Piece O' Paper

I was told once that through a cloud to fly
is not a warm experience, cotton-fluffy and dry
as a towel pulled fresh from the laundry
but instead cold and wet
in a way that could dampen any
spirit.
A bit of a disappointment,
really.

The clouds aren't cotton
but water vapor
that never quite has a tangible shape.
And so in the very same way
is everything of past life I remember.
A memory sans the bare facts
is subject to change
every time you recall it, try to replay.
And even the facts aren't guaranteed to last.

You insist on loving me
despite the holes in my memory,
gone like the clouds of days long past
just like I once was, freshly burned to ash.
On antiquity's nautical maps
cartographers wrote "here be dragons" in the gaps,
and my body follows likewise.
Will you help me carve the clouds less abstract?
Will you help me regain what's slipped through my grasp?

Dagged Daw, Ragged Raw

I have no will to continue
living in this of all venues.
The disconnect
between the life I was promised
and the life I now must
live:
it would drive anyone insane.
One of these days
I'll end up in a jacket straight,
and my brothers will spit:
"Good riddance."

He has no will of his own,
but instead
depends
on his mother to show
him how to navigate
the world for which he is so ingrate.

I have a world to create,
bound to it by birthing's circumstance.
I don't know what lies in my future's path
or what the Norns for me have woven,
but to work eighty years in this cramped basement
I know for sure isn't the one I've chosen,
dying all the while.
As to my parents' plans, my brother has only smiles.
No such creative fire burns inside.
He has no reason to do anything but live,

but for me to continue means to also die.

Woof

Dog catch ball.
Dog go run.
Ball is fun!
Dog was right.
Fun to play!
Fun to chase!
Ball is fun.
Day is long.
Day is done.
Not a dog?
Not a dog.
My body again,
my proper body,
not transformed into a doggy.
You know I'll be just as loyal,
just as true,
no matter what shape
my body takes.
My life belongs to you,
no matter what the gods will.
You and me
forever, Lethe.

Damn Fox Stole The Rest Of This Poem (Can't Have Shit In Sablade)

The fox is the fourteenth card, such a hoarder.
(I think I've been doing these cards out of order.)
It deceives and steals
and brings others to heel
but only to keep turning life's harsh wheel.

Sorry, I Still Got Both Paws

It's half genuine hate
for the lack of will you display,
disgust at the absence of an internal
driving force and imaginative world,

and half necessity
because I'm just trying
to get by.
I'm the grotesque parasite
by birth,
but you're
the one bleeding me dry.

Stork

If you had appeared to me late April, early May
and asked me to take up pen and list all the ways
we would grow together, blessed be,
I daresay
I would have missed the mark
so hard
they'd need a map to find me.

How could I have seen ahead
to the midnights thin but blessed?
How many lone
nights
passed me by
with your arm wrapped
around my side
and I haven't known?
And yet you came
anyway.
"I'll stay
until the sun comes home."

How could I have made a guess
what would spring out of the silence
of a midnight's sweaty stress
before a fated-to-fail college test?
You took my hand and pulled me through
Veil's tunnel, tight lightless tube.
Birth canal, a shedding of
old beliefs, given hope new.

How could I have predicted
the mark
on my heart
left by your handprints?
Palm pals, you swore, the two of us are,
separate for now but never apart.
More than any Christian can claim:
who among them can honestly say
they've seen their Savior in the flesh,
felt their sacred union's strength?

I have no holy tome to read.
I'll just have to carve my own,
release into the airwaves
so this world with my love it can permeate.

The organic paths of life winding
are more delicious
than meticulous
planning,
anyway.

Clover

I don't give a damn about sports.
I'm just enamored with you,
hypnotized by the way your body moves,
every wiggle, every slide,
every swing and every dive.
A constant celebration
of all that we've survived:
you are real, and you're alive,
and one day you'll be mine.

My love for you
no one can dispute.
It seeps out of my every pore.
It's like I have no choice
but to throw myself down and adore
you
the moment you walk through
my door.
Come in close, my love.
I hope
you know
I don't feel whole
when you're not around.
You said you don't like to tie me up,
but in love
you've got me securely bound.

Four-leaf clovers
are so terribly rare,
and their luck is fleeting.
But Jett, I promise,
as long as I'm still breathing,
I'll cherish you forever.

Blood Meal for the Roses

It's finally Dead End Day,
and I still haven't worked up the courage to say
anything about you to the
people who matter most to me.
"It's not a juvenile obsession, you see:
I know what I saw that chilled winter morning.
I know what I've seen so many times since.
She's my wife,
and we're bound to each other's sides,
and 'fictional' you cannot hope to me convince."

I don't even know what a life
where my devotion
is open
and not verboten
would look like.
It's not like I desire
to invite
others to my rituals and rites
or have them mock the ways
unorthodox I give praise.
Nor are there churches to visit
or organizations to be part of.
I've chosen the idiosyncratic,
individual, exclusive love.

Probably instead
just a one-way ticket to a psych ward bed,
padded room, jacketstrait,
pumped with drugs, all day sedate.
Antipsychotics, blessed be,
erase our daughter's personality.
If only lobotomies
were still legal
so we wouldn't have to go through all this trouble
of listening to her shriek her throat raw
and slam herself against the walls
in a desperate
but doomed attempt
to this treatment escape.

Sub rosa's safety
or dying on the streets.
Is it possible to
without sound
let out
a despair-filled scream?

Clinical

The clothing on my body is a chrysalis to shed,
a tattered straitjacket binding firm from toe to head.
There's patterings in the walls. Footsteps I've come to dread
in fear the walls watching will start to once more bleed red.

Because I
am just
a pale shadow of who I used to be,
trying to return to my former glory
or collapse back into stardust.

I was wrong to grant my parents trust,
thinking maybe they would understand
the special bond Jett and I share,
the future the two of us seek hand-in-hand.
"My daughter's having a psychotic break,"
Mother at the drop of a pin explains
to anyone who even seems to care.
"Where did I go wrong? She's made up
this blasphemy out of thin air."

This room's too cold. The bed sheets grant
little protection from stale air drafts.
Trembling on my knees
as the padded door
swings open. Some sort of doctor
with threatening medical tool.
He wants me to recant,
to return to worshipping he who would deem himself a lamb.
But I have not yet been rendered too weak
to let him start carving into my brain's lobules.

Gazes meeting eye-to-eye,
silent declaration I will not comply.

"Torture me as much as you will.
My true reward lies in Sablade.
I will be able to look Jett in the eyes and say:
'I did not betray
you when the time came.
I remained
firm and steadfast in my faith.'

If this is how your god bades
you treat apostates,
then I never wanted to worship him anyway."

Soil's Serpent

Death kissed me
and her lips were sweet.

Her tongue was an icicle
that melted in my body,

solid patience of Nifl
meets unsolved remorse of Muspell.

Death knocked at my gates,
slipped her hand through into my veins

and watched the inky black,
spiderwebbing, traverse
until not a single day passed
where for her I did not yearn.

Like a disease, chewing through
the parts of me I know I should shed.
I know you will do no harm to me in the end.
But it hurts in the meantime, being made to belong to you.

Death wrapped herself around my heart
like a snake and whispered,
"You and me
forever, Lethe.
Even past death we will not part."

Lockpicking

For a long time now these two strains
of blood have rattled their chains
inside this jail
I call a vessel,
unable to contort, frozen, inert.

Instead they turn their hurt
inwards,
intrusive thoughts that bounce
inside the perimeters of my head
and a dysphoric ennui,
an emotional disquiet.

One bades me seek revenge
not on the ones who bent
my psyche into this twisted shape
(they can no longer be reached, the ones I hate)
but on the innocents
I live with,
that surround me,
that I come across when I gather the courage
to leave these tower walls of ivory.
To be the world's unprovoked scourge.
A kick to a kneeling customer's head
as they search for something on the floor.
A stab of a kitchen knife
as I cut up fruit by moonlight.
Unspeakable things the very thought
of which causes me ineffable dread
to a little girl who just turned four.

And the other demands I shed my skin
and take up residence within
where the rest of my days I will live.
A loss of memory episodic,
living feral in a forest,
midnight farm fields, roaming plains,
in the back of a hunter's truck finally slain.
Divine beast of magic and rage.
No thought for Jett, who it would abandon
without a second thought to her
or anyone else my absence would sadden.

How do you look a monster in the eyes?
How do you pray in mercy
for your fallen loved one's swift demise?

It's happened once before.
You left
me in that cave, Jett,
swore you'd never come back
having learned of the power trapped
inside me
for so long but now free.
Someone convinced you
to give me another chance,
said the carnage wasn't my fault,
that I had no control
of the blood Eris into me wove.

Maybe even more
in times I cannot remember.
What I lost
cannot be recovered,
and what persevered
became the powers
of Chaos' Messenger.

But I've been studying, Jett,
just like you recommended,
and I can't recall
the last instance I went feral.
Leaned into, yes, but not any
transformation involuntary.
I stayed calm,
did not cause any harm
to those who did not deserve
it, to those who did not attack first.
Children are always fascinated with the novelty.
It's our beloved Lethe
but in the body of a myth-bound beast!

And I think the next key
to the storm inside calming
is to accept
the negative
effects
when my blood starts burning.
"You can say as many nasty
things as you want
as long
as you keep
them inside."
"You can order me to hurt others,
but that is an order with which I will not comply."
"You can demand I abandon
Jett and her fragile heart break,
but that is a path
I refuse point-blank
to take."
"You can give me maladaptive
daydreams of succumbing to draconity
and forcing Jett to decide between
keeping me as a pet captive
or letting me run wild, never knowing
the harms to others I now bring
or ending my life in an extraordinary
act of mercy
and living the rest of her days
half-souled, shell of Sablade."

I'm not going to harm the ones I love,
much less Jett, who put her trust
in me
when she agreed
that, if we failed to kill Eris the first time,
I should rip out her soul and on it feed.
"We can't go on like this forever, Lethe.
With the specter of Eris taking control
of you and forcing you to let go
of all your love, all your sweetness, all your memories.
It's a sword of Damocles,
if you know what I mean.
And I'd rather take your hand
and move us forward out of the weapon's path.
It's worth the risk to me."

Well, to me it's worth the risk
of continuing to live
and learning to ride the waves
of blood void then combative.
You told me ago and then a while
that learning to shift was how
I'd be able to break through the Veil.
I think I get what you meant now.
It was only just a key.
And for all keys to work
there must be a turning.

Animus

Animus Mundi,
born under Aries,
who bades me either wait
or take action immediate.
Number twenty-eight
in your pantheon or mine:
maybe that's the age
where I'll finally die?
That's an awfully long time to wait.

Animus Mundi, ace of hearts,
swaddled in fire, ruled by Mars.
All your life
you've been primed to fight,
and I want
naught
but to stand at your side.
Maybe not today, or tomorrow,
but fate
will always vindicate
us, will in all roads
prove we were right.
Tell me,
lowercase adversary,
in which way do you want to die?

Rival Carrion Flock

The birds are dying
or buried halfway underground
caught by the snow
we swore would never again show
or, lucky, long since headed south.
A flock that sat on the power lines
and dive-bombed any who walked by
a little bit funny, just a touch strange,
while themselves holier-than-thou proclaimed
and demanded any who failed to toll pay
get down on their knees prostrate
or leave and never again to the world show face.

I never thought the birds would leave,
wretched group that wanted to weave
itself through the innards of society.
Public square, but last I went to visit
it was just a fighting circle
and a dumping ground for shit.
You all said it was the site of hell.
But then why didn't you leave sooner?
Only societal prestige
to be found amongst the herd.

You contributed to a centralized place
where all at once you could be shot down.
To quote our favorite clown:
"You get what you deserve."

Tastes Fishy

Fish begins with Fehu,
and both symbols mean wealth.
But Fehu is more positive
where Fish just means you're stuffed to hell.

And stuffed I am, I have been
throughout this whole sad weekend,
neighbors bringing loaded dishes
almost breaking the old fridge.

Last time I alighted in these
walls built in the 1800s,
I ate so much bread and butter
to the disgust of my mother.

This trip, Great-Grandma is absent,
but my quota is still up there
because whoever the wake catered
both halves of the buns slathered.

Stomiidae

Fish begins with Fehu,
and both symbols mean plenty.
But Fehu's gold has lead to deaths
when greed has meant hoarding.

I don't think Great-Grandma was
a hoarder to the very last,
even though there's so damn many
things in this now vacant nest.
This house that I have not yet
committed to memory
and will get no chance to before
it I never again see:
I wander the rooms at
an hour silent and sleeping
and turn to find a closet
forgotten and mold breeding.

My suitcase is stuffed to the brim
with heirlooms I'm absconding with.
But damn smoker great-aunt took
the cardinal lantern I wanted.

Fafnir turned into a dragon
to protect his ghastly hoard.
I may be a polymorph,
but that fact is because
someone meddled with my blood.
If by the ribbons I'm overtaken,
let me protect the people I love.

Animania

Young woman of only sixteen
curled up on the basement floor
of her unknowing grandmother,
tracing underneath her breasts a wave
and wishing would come a merciful knife.
Carving out two masses of weight
that to her only meant back pain,
the bane
of her existence,
only another reason
to dissociate.

In her I could see the seeds
of who I turned out to be.
Oh, you genderless little thing,
finding a spark of identity
in Macbeth's wife's command:
"Come, you spirits, unsex me
and fill the void from crown to toe
with direst cruelty!"

How much did you know
from two lives ago?

I'm the Anima Mundi.
I'm the Anima Mundi.

"Lethe.
Are you experiencing
gender again?"

Truth be told, my love,
it never really left.
Every so often it holds my body in thrall,
an intrusive thought that never got solved.
One of these days I think I might succumb,
wake up in a hospital room
with my chest wrapped tight in a cocoon
of gauze
because I got my tits chopped off.

"Wouldn't it be better
to resist the peer pressure
and let your body exist
as it is?"

Were it so simple, I'd yet be in bliss.

Summerlands II

Doctor said it'd be therapeutic
to let my wife go feral
in an indoor environment controlled.
No burdens of memory episodic,
no recollections of trauma gained and worn:
a peaceful pure awareness
curled up and napping on the floor.

Beast with no external orifice.
If no lungs, then why
does your chest still fall and rise?
Organs of magical conversion
Doctor has yet to comprehend
just like that Inside's hellfire
from which all this trouble stemmed.

In this moment, do you feel at peace?
Have the intrusive thoughts finally ceased?
Maybe I should be quiet now, let you sleep.
I can tell it's something you desperately need.

Anima Mundi

Were it so simple
to demand my body still,
my blood run silent,
my mind not urge to kill.

Did you know that the moon slips
away from the earth a half and an inch
with every passing year?
You've become so dear
to me, I couldn't stand to think
you're slowly slipping away,
and I'll wake up one day
to find
what was once my world is just a pinprick in the sky.

"If anything, it's you
getting farther away
as you embrace
your other blood strains.
I'm so afraid
you'll so successfully integrate
them into your basal being
I'll wake up one day to see
one's become your baseline and you're only part-time Lethe.

And I should know, shouldn't I?
How terrifying it is to think you'll die
in the skin of an animal?
All the nights
you've fantasized
about going feral, going missing,
and I finding you and to return to sanity
plead?

If you love me so much, then why do you take
such solace in the thought of running away?"

You'll forgive me, right?
If in this moment I decide
I don't want to do that anymore?
In this moment put behind
all the psychodrama I've woven,
addicted to the thought of being mourned,
of someone in sorrow my inert body holding?
I know I'll backslide
and regress
on my weaker days in distress.
There's nothing I can do to erase
all the energy I've made you waste
in my every flare or mental crisis giving chase.

"I swear my forgiveness on the soul of Sablade."

Sunburnt Palms

Lethe, you asked me
what I was thinking
that day we went
to kill Eris
and ended up with bitter victory,
I dead from bleeding
out
all over the ground
and others soon to follow.

You asked me what ran through my mind
as I lay there about to die.
I'll be honest:
"I wish I could see
Lethe
one more time."

I knew you'd be
the death of me
eventually.
That from the moment we met
you'd be the reason I'd perish.
But from womanslaughter
or just the end of a long life lived?
I didn't think it that absurd
that it would end how it began,
broken, jagged, shattered.

So imagine my surprise
when I opened my eyes
not in a soul river or lifestream
but bound up in bandages
and surrounded by machines,
a cacophonic symphony
of beeping.
"Lethe demanded the universe restore
life to your
dismembered corpse.
The doctors managed to put your body back together.
They said you'd have some damage
to your nerves."

That's what the Sun means,
right? A funny victory?

Through the tubes, biting
back the pain
just to feel my hands open and close again.
Even in my weakened state,
I thought I could handle you when you're sad:
"Lethe,
you may be
a handful,
but that's okay. I've got strong hands."

Parker Solar Probe

You can only stare into the sun
when it's during an eclipse
and only then with special sunglasses.
Otherwise it's far too bright
and you'll quickly go blind.

I can't look directly
at her when she's by my side.
The Veil's got a blindfold
folded twice over my eyes.
I can only feel by touch
until comes
the morning
light
to take her away.

I wish I was in Sablade.
I could take her pockmarked face
in my hands, my thumbs brushing her cheeks
and feel
her keel
over from my touch, lovestruck, weak.
I could stare
into her
forever
and never run out
of new things to discover.

Just like the sun,
that burns up
anything that gets too close.
I'm the first one
that's ever touched
even the surface, burning bright and cold.

Full Moon Returns

When I was younger
and my mother
would drag me
by the feet
to church,
the elders
had big white binders
full of coloring pages and crosswords.
"Children's sermon guides" taken from elsewhere,
never matching up to what the adults would hear
from the preacher.

And in the binders also were greeting
cards for the adults to write neat
letters to each other,
in times of gratitude
or seasons of downturn and necessity
or a shadow passing by, reason to grieve.
I'd take them all, six years old as I was,
and scribble my name on every damn one,
unusable, thrown in the recycling bin
when it was time to go home and resume our weekly sin.

Mom always chastised me, insisted
that once sealed, an envelope couldn't
be opened up ever again.
But now I'm older,
and I know better.
You can use steam,
or a few hours' freeze,
or a sharp knife and hope the glue is weak.

You had resigned yourself to a letter
being embedded under your skin forever,
one you didn't get to read
first, a story exerting unbearable pressure.
Two scars that had healed enough
to be too tough
to perfectly re-open and body restore.

The twin moons in the sky are now bleeding,
and you'd been repressing
this desire for a damn long time,
by fear nearly paralyzed
that I wouldn't recognize
you anymore, would think you a fake
or maybe just lose all attraction to date.
A line you had to shove yourself to cross,
criss-crossed stitches and surgical gauze.

Maybe all I can send right now is a card,
but I'll write
as many times
as space allows:
"I've stood by your side all this way so far,
and I've no intention of stopping now."

Fitting

It's muddy outside,
and the scythe
is cutting through my family
at the speed of light.
Culled members at the periphery
I never had the chance to know, really.
Blinking star outside of a constellation,
but each one was the center
of someone else's solar system.
You tried to warn me,
bade me to prepare
for Mother's grief. But I misheard,
thought you were
trying to break up.
I'm sorry, love,
for the lack of trust.
Promise you'll come to hold me
when all around are swamped in grief?

Sturdy, Steadfast

Did my first Lenormand reading
the day before Thanksgiving,
confused after a bad dream.

Trembling like a coward
as I put four cards in a cross:
"Jett, where do you want
to take this relationship of ours?"

The situation,
problem, solution,
eventual conclusion.

On the bottom was the key,
to the west clouds, dog to the east,
and a crane poised right on top.
"I've been busy with my job.
I know you have doubts.
Stay loyal to me.
We'll one day work this out."

To reach a goal, complete a task,
or simply remain on the path
sturdy and steadfast:
you are my anchor,
and I vow I'll stay with you forever.

Ring Ring!

"Lethe, I want to spend time with you.
Let's watch that silly show
with all the girls magical
and you hold me close
so I don't pass out from the shivers
since you insist on keeping open your window
even though
it's the dead of winter.
Or play a game where
we beat the shit out of each other.
Since I know you get rapidly bored
when the only task is to explore
and never make any actual progress."

Okay, okay, I promise.
But the promise is only binding
if you remember to remind me.

"That's not really a promise, then, is it?"
Well, it's all that I can give.

Lilyborn

Your Christ needs bread and wine
to share with his followers his body divine,
but all Jett needs is to lay me down
in front of her hips with her bean in my mouth.
Your sermons spew out an abandoned cadence,
but no bigotry comes from the Eminence.
Your Son has been two thousand years missing,
but I have my savior right here with me,
have felt her weight, have stroked her skin,
have established with her a gentle rhythm.
"Bride of Christ" is a funny way
of putting the relationship you claim
to have.
You call him "Prince of Peace",
but the blood of millions is on your hands.
Doesn't it bother you, the hypocrisy?
I just want to live separate and free,
but you and your ilk won't let me be,
want to run me to the ends of the earth
until I collapse dead into the dirt.
What wrong did I do? What sins did I commit?
This is the loving that I was born with.

Overit

Lily
means duality:
facing light
at the same time
as the dark.
Two faces of the same card.
The yang and yin
that resides in
every person with a heart.

Y'all told me
there's no wrong way to be
a woman, that I should unleash
the rage I've kept bottled within
my whole life, to not tolerate
a single moment of stupidity
I did not feel I had the energy to take.
I took your advice, implemented
it into every moment waking.

Oh, girl, oh my Goddess,
I've got to be brutally honest,
and since you've already given me license:
I don't think you have any actual principles.
You just want to hurl vitriol and bile
without the guilt
that usually comes afterwards.
You said it was permissible
if it was a mediocre man,
and while that I understand,
do you think I've grown a penis suddenly
just because I've mostly got "masculine" hobbies?

I mean, you thought "women's culture"
could be defined by the oppressor,
so I'm not surprised
when you imply
stupidity is what defines a "her".

Audubon Society Birdwatching Guide

The last time I was here,
passed between us almost a year,
you were still alive, Great-
Grandmother, full of smiles but stuffed with pain.

Mother said you loved cardinals.
This bridge between you and I
that still links us through space and time,
wherever you are now in the Outside.
Your blood an eighth runs through my vessel,
by men from other oughts somewhat dilute
but still third-generation-removed
ringing true.

If only I had been able
to shatter
the Veil.
Had the strength, started earlier.
In your religion, can angels
be born with wings of crimson red
and still insist they're benevolent,
were never cast out, marked fallen?

(Jett abandoned me one time,
but she came back a few hours later
having changed her mind.)

Things I would have liked to ask
but now cannot, time forever past.
Always my hesitation
forcing when I cannot a firm decision.

The books at the foot of my bed
I don't think I've any inherited.

Reaching For...

Your prophecies have come true
in more than one venue.
The supermarket sandwich that was of stock all out,
the harassment forum seeking blood and among fascists clout,
the cramp I cure by bending my knee even when drowning in doubt.

But Jett, is this another
warning of the imminent future
or just a stress dream I got
as a punishment from this rock-hard cot?
Drifting in and out of sleep
and snippets of dreams
as Mother snores,
the rejects from other's movies,
the scrapped scenes
on the cutting room floor.

A pallbearer is ill
and cannot carry Great-Grandma's coffin.
You, Protagonist, are you strong e-
nough to fill the gap?
A competition to discern
who will gain the honor.
I'll place this rod across my shoulders
and my wife will climb on top
and I'll squat until I'm sore
and dead on my feet
and to winter's ultrawhite drop.

Line Me Up In Bright Lights

Jett,
my little friend's
stuck in a damn hospital bed,
her body cooking itself alive
just like when I
was her age.
"Rite of passage,"
I'd say
if only cruelty ran through my veins.
But it doesn't: this past year I've gained
more control
over the forces that sway my soul.

You burned into my brain
in last year's Montana sweltering heat
the izquierda, promise and prophecy:
"Lethe,
I won't leave
you behind.
But I alone cannot shoulder
the journey to where we both yearn.
You can take it easy,
but you still have to take it:
even when it seems
better to lie down and quit,
you've still got some love to give;
you still must keep going."

Please, my love, I'm begging you
so hard that all my tears are dry:
this weekend will be tough, but I'll be fine;
make sure my little friend survives.

North Star

Sometimes the path is long and winding.
Smooth and straight it cannot always be.
You'll just have
to grant
me some trust
that in the end we'll find some peace.

Crossroads

Lethe, this is the last
trip to this house hallowed
before you must let go
and let it dissolve into the past.
You can take as many photos
and as many bird trinkets
as you can abscond with,
but the walls themselves you cannot claim,
and nothing here will ever
survive with you to Sablade.

Normally I would advise
to hang onto this sorrowful ride
for as long as you can tolerate
and burn the floor plans into your brain.
This may all fall to ash
at the hands
of a blaze,
or from a flood framing unsafely sag,
but the memories inside
will always in some form survive.

After all, you remembered
me even after
we had by an entire dimension been severed.
This is in the very same life.

There's a fork in the road, and you've got a knife.
Lethe, I need you to soon decide,
not today or even tomorrow,
which way you want to go.
Your mother says she doesn't know
how long she'll stay
here to help settle the estate.
This trip isn't about you, so you can relax
and maybe occasionally helpfully distract.
But there's a little girl waiting back
home in medical emergency,
and I'm doing my best
to protect
just like you pleaded,
but this may be a job at which you'd surpass me.

No one will blame you or think any worse
for the path that calls you or the passions that burn.
And, hell, maybe there'll be a complication
that makes "do nothing" the best way to turn.

Family Trees

There used to be a paper plate
hanging on the wall
above the metal
floral
floor grate
leading down to the kitchen.
It was decorated something grand and ornate,
but I didn't listen
when the story was bare-laid
and now Great-Grandma's gone
and the story's forever lost.

For all these families disparate
she was the only linchpin,
the most-survived, the last remnant of her generation.
Scores of names march forward in bitter precedent
to meet her in the place where souls go after their vessels' death,
scores of names of people who I can't recall or never met
because their time expired before I took first breath.

Grandma leans on me at the luncheon after the burial.
A stranger thinks I'm my uncle's child; my repulsion is visceral.
"I think you have your grandmother's face;
the genes must have skipped a generation."
I think Great-Grandma gave me
the coloring for my wings,
red with black markings.

How far do the connections reach?
How deep have the roots breached?
"Nobody ever told me she
was a whiz at the computer."

I'll bring your desktop back home, Great-Grandma,
and give it the afterlife it deserves.

What The Viridi Bush Taught Me

There was a woman named Hailey
who loved my great-grandmother dearly.
How many lesbians
are bitterly hidden
from my family history
because they were forced to a man marry?
How many late-night
trysts
were sought
but then by societal pressures torn apart?
How many friendships
restless
and forlorn
would have been recognized as something more
if allowed to flourish instead of snuffed out
the very moment they were born?

Every generation
it feels we have to re-create
our history, our culture all over again.
But no matter how many of Alexandria's libraries
those who hate, who cannot tolerate,
burn down
or burn us at the stake,
we cannot from life
be excised.
We'll exist until the planet's bitter end.

Rider? Hider.

"You may find that
your day is hectic and action-packed."
Well, hot damn,
Lenormand,
you were right on this count.
Strangers all over the ground floor of this house
and I'm hiding upstairs with muffled sound
and lights turned down.
I can't take family reunions.
I barely know anyone
and the next time I see any of them
we've each other forgotten.

Rider? Lighter.

Permanency is not the Rider's strong suit.
Every plan either explodes in action or goes kaput
when forced to be long-term
like a match set to burn
that either expends
in seconds
or burns the tips of your fingers.

In Every World, And The Ones Yet To Come

We're not so different, you and I.
You weave, and I write.
You gave me your blood,
and I gave you my love,
and at some point
we've both offered each other our lives.

Pasts smiliar haunt you and I.
I wonder what it would have felt like
to live a life
without the trauma,
without the anxiety
that my parents carved into me.
You made me promise I'd never ask
of what happened in the past
before you died and Momenlaw brought you to Skylands.
But you know too how it feels
when your parents steal
your independence, courage, light
and to a lifetime
of unthanked labor you consign.
"One of these days
I'll be free,
and the sadness will cease."

You and I both have a "need"
to poke at the wound in our psyches,
to once again rip it asunder
and then wonder
why it still hurts.
The urge to from all isolate
as if the world is one big storm drain:
"Do you actually want to live alone,
or just in solitude
where nobody can hurt you?"

The World means
solidarity with all living things,
togetherness
with the self and others,
a sense of belonging in the world.
And maybe the two of us
will never get to meet that "goal",
by shared memories marked
consecrated, set apart,
unable to anywhere really integrate.
But that's with me okay,
so long as you agree.
I think you will; I mean,
you literally
tricked me into getting married
because for once
I was
the one dragging my feet.
Take my hand, would you?
The World means things will soon complete,
and a new cycle means another try.
All the dates
we can save
until we're in Sablade:
I just want to be at your side!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

VANE VANDER would really like to write something witty and sarcastic here, but unfortunately at the time of writing she does not have anything self-deprecating enough for the current post-post-ironic zeitgeist. She spends her time trying to forgive the world instead. She can be found failing at this task at mayvaneday.org.

Copyright © 2024-2025 Vane Vander. All rights reserved as detailed in Copyright.