Month: September 2008

sonno

my sinister sleep
clings, wraps full arms around me
coyly buxom and full of honeyed memory
her silky weeds are my lover's hair
tangled between fingers, plump thighs
and my awakening

she keeps me close

flying

There were tears in my eyes from the wind.

The world is a different place at 5000 feet, and when your hanging from a glider, bleeding altitude in sharp turns and steep stalls, the world is a roller coaster of green and blue.

Leaning forward lowered the front of the glider and I picked up speed at the expense of height. The landing strip was now about 1300 feet below; I shifted my weight to the left, nudging the glider into a graceful turn that left us lined up for a landing, and then pulled back while leaning to the right to straighten us out and settle us at trim speed.

The landing, when it came, was swift and a bit bumpy. I extricated myself from the harness, feeling earth under my feet for the first time in an hour.

I was smiling when I walked away.

fountain of splinters

A carving, a slow deliberate cut, curled petals sharp enough to splinter; known touch with fingers outstretched, following the grooves, the moist wooden harbor I fight to free you from.

I worshiped you once, as goddess and tree. Your heartbeat was stronger then mine, slow as molasses and timed for the season. Your roots went deeper, stretching far enough back to taste the earth.

And you danced. Oh, how you danced, your gown of red and yellow tattered by the song, your arms stretched to the sun and the moon and the stars. You danced; but you danced only for the wind.

I wanted you to dance for me.

—

Who will earn your tears?

Who will taste the evidence of your sorrow?

Who will kiss away the remnants of your joy?

I will.

the Beauty and the Best – The Hunger

An excerpt of a story I worked on last year; this scene takes place about half-way through the story.

At dinner, Rose has refused the Beast's request to be his for the third time; in terror of reprisal, Rose fled back to her room.

—

In the rising tide of his hunger, Lord Beast’s growl was low and constant and it sent all of the servants standing in front of Rose’s door fleeing down the passageway; all but one, that is, for a lone boy, a young stable hand, remained shaking in front of the oak door that marked the entrance to Rose’s room.

Lord Beast reached back to knock the boy aside, the massive knot of muscles along his right arm tensing under a dark coat of his fur, but he read the terror in the boy's eyes and hesitated, a slender thread of humanity winding a path through the dark cloud of red. "Boy," came the growl through the Beast's clenched teeth, "Move or die."

"No M'lord…you c-cannot, not like this," said the boy, his terror driving his voice an octave higher as he cringed against the door. 

"You will move." said the Beast, "You will move, or you will die."

The boy quavered, tears leaking from his frightened blue eyes, but his trembling ten year old frame did not move; it was entirely possible that, in his fear, moving was a feat he was no longer capable of. "Y-you mustn't, M'lord, you mustn't."

The last of Lord Beast's patience vanished, "She will live. Beyond that," Beast said, plucking the boy up by the back of his dirty shirt and tossing him, not ungently, to the side, "I give no promises."

Resting a large hand on the oak door, Lord Beast pushed it open. Rose was sitting on the edge of her bed, face obscured by her long midnight hair; at the sight of her, the Beast's hunger erased all remaining thoughts of mercy; a coil made of the tightly fused threads of anger and desire twisted through him as he crossed the space to her bed in a haze of crimson.

For a long minute, Lord Beast stood towering over her diminutive form in silence.

Rose did not look up.

"Rose."

There was no answer.

"Rose!"

Silence.

"ROSE!" His roar shook the very bed she sat upon, and yet she still did not move. Hand trembling in anger, Beast placed a single finger under her chin and tilted it up. There were tears in her eyes, rivers of fear that dripped over her chin and into her lap where her hands were clasped tightly.

Her eyes, shiny and bright with trepidation, met his.

"What makes you think you have a choice?" he asked.

Beast watched her skin pale, only to flush red a moment later. She lowered her eyes, and his large hand went to her cheek, tracing the rosy glow.

"I don't." She spoke reluctantly, unsure.

“No,” the Beast said, “You don’t.”

empty cities

Perhaps there is some sadness; when one sleeps with a woman curled in his arms for the first time in years, there is a moment of loneliness, a half-remembered dream of what it is like to capture someone for more then a few moments.

There is nothing so painful as longing. It is the old sorrow, the ache that demands tears alongside anger, laughter amid indifference.

The City In Which I Loved You by Li-Young Lee

And when, in the city in which I love you,
even my most excellent song goes unanswered,
and I mount the scabbed streets,
the long shouts of avenues,
and tunnel sunken night in search of you…

That I negotiate fog, bituminous
rain rining like teeth into the beggar's tin,
or two men jackaling a third in some alley
weirdly lit by a couch on fire, that I
drag my extinction in search of you…

Past the guarded schoolyards, the boarded-up churches, swastikaed
synagogues, defended houses of worship, past
newspapered windows of tenements, along the violated,
the prosecuted citizenry, throughout this
storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed
city I call home, in which I am a guest…

a bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so
I'm vexed to love you, your body

the shape of returns, your hair a torso
of light, your heat
I must have, your opening
I'd eat, each moment
of that soft-finned fruit,
inverted fountain in which I don't see me.

My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.
The vein in my neck
adores you. A sword
stands up between my hips,
my hidden fleece send forth its scent of human oil.

The shadows under my arms,
I promise, are tender, the shadows
under my face. Do not calculate,
but come, smooth other, rough sister.
Yet, how will you know me

among the captives, my hair grown long,
my blood motley, my ways trespassed upon?
In the uproar, the confusion
of accents and inflections
how will you hear me when I open my mouth?

Look for me, one of the drab population
under fissured edifices, fractured
artifices. Make my various
names flock overhead,
I will follow you.
Hew me to your beauty.

Stack in me the unaccountable fire,
bring on me the iron leaf, but tenderly.
Folded one hundred times and
creased, I'll not crack.
Threshed to excellence, I'll achieve you.

but in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark,

no finger touches me secretly, no mouth
tastes my flawless salt,
no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming
in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses;
hulls clogged, I continue laden, translated

by exhaustion and time's appetite, my sleep abandoned
in bus stations and storefront stoops,
my insomnia erected under a sky
cross-hatched by wires, branches,
and black flights of rain. Lewd body of wind

jams me in the passageways, doors slam
like guns going off, a gun goes off, a pie plate spins
past, whizzing its thin tremolo,
a plastic bag, fat with wind, barrels by and slaps
a chain-link fence, wraps it like clung skin.

In the excavated places,
I waited for you, and I did not cry out.
In the derelict rooms, my body needed you,
and there was such flight in my breast.
During the daily assaults, I called to you,

~ excerpted from Li-Young Lee's The City In Which I Loved You

the languid touch

It is dangerous to push yourself against that edge in the hope the cuts it leaves behind are ones that will be reminders, small scars on the inside, that tell you that you were there, that you were possessed completely.

Cruelty comes easy, but it is the languid gentle touch that cuts deepest; a finger along the cheek, warm breath tickling skin, light kisses that taste the curve of a breast.