I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh; I have been called a
hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the world goes
dim and cold. I am a hero.
She has been nameless since our birth; a constant adversary, caring for
nothing but my ruin, a sword drenched in my blood; forever my greatest
and only love. She is the dark one; the enemy and lover without whom
my very existence would be pathetic and vulgar. Her eyes steam and boil
in the night (she is fantastically beautiful yet i cannot stand the sight
of her). Our relationship is complex and perhaps eternal.
We met once in the garden, at the beginning of the world and unaware of
our twin destinies (not the garden of Genesis, but another; forgotten,
untended and now choked with weeds, unvisited except for ourselves).
We matched stares across a dry fountain, and I recall her smiling at me
before she devoured the lawn and trees with a translucent blue flame and
tore flagstones from the path and hurled them into the sky screaming my
sins.
Our reunions there are epic battles fought without quarter, often in
the dark as the moon is seldom visible and the sun never. I powder a
granite monument in a soundless flash, showering the grass with molten
drops of its gold inlay, sending smoking chips of stone skipping into
the fog. she splinters an ancient oak with a force that takes my
breath and hurls me to the ground. She leaves and i lie in the slow
rain of burning slivers of wood, staring at the low, dark clouds,
craving our next meeting.
---
We held hands on the last night on earth. Our mouths filled with dust. We kissed in the fields and under the trees, screaming like dogs, bleeding dark into the leaves.
It was empty on the edge of town but we knew everyone floated along the bottom of the river. So we walked through the waste, where the road curved into the sea and the shattered seasons lay. And the bitter smell of burning was on you like a disease.
In our cancer of passion you said, "Death is a midnight runner."
The sky had come crashing down like the news of an intimate suicide. We picked up the shards and formed them into shapes of stars that I wore like an antique wedding dress.
The echoes of the past broke the hearts of the unborn as the ferris wheel silently slowed to a stop. The few insects skittered away in hopes of a better pastime.
I kissed you at the apex of the maelstrom and asked if you would accompany me in a quick fall, but you made me realize that my ticket wasn't good for two.
I rode alone.
You said, "The cinders are falling like snow."
There is poetry in despair, and we sang with unrivaled beauty. Bitter elegies of savagery and eloquence, of blue and gray.
Strange, we ran down desperate streets and carved our names in the flesh of the city. The sun has stagnated somewhere beyond the rim of the horizon and the darkness is a mystery of curves and lines.
Still, we lay under the emptiness and drifted slowly outward,
and somewhere in the wilderness we found salvation scratched into the earth like a message.
Mindscape 4 (soon to be upgraded)
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