The oceanic pulse roiled within the marrow of my bones and the quaking stirred what was left of the fire.  Desire I had metered out in strips like litmus paper came back bruised, crumpled in to several tiny balls each one blacker than the last.  Disparate and broken, the bloody pieces caged between my ribs bounce in their newly formed likeness.


My punishment.

I smart at the suggestion that the thousands of seconds spent locked in a death defying standoff between dueling brothers can now be reduced to a shrugged shoulder dismissing the tension with a heft of breath and a noncommittal statement of nothing. I have written words enough to encase the universe with thread in commemoration of a phantom that stood guard as I slept in metamorphosis, expanding within the confines of a well intentioned embrace. And still, when the cocoon unraveled and my wings poised wet from the exertion of creation to explode the box of matchsticks where I had laid in confinement, I let them drop like a wilting lily behind me so the destruction would not impale you, my shadow, my ghost, my goblin. The price we both pay is impotence.

The flight deck on flames, the burnt husk of a kamikaze pilot blackened and grotesque stares with infinite eyes into the fear of the king's enlisted men. It is in this moment that I come to know God. Stinging from the fumes of dead bodies, I rise above a scene frozen in the immortality of ghosts. Away above curls of smoke and vaporized flesh I flee the terror of my self-knowledge and seek refuge in the distractions of hell.

Come to me, Hecate, and fill the needs of this soulless body. Mortify the ornate marionettes and burn their strings. Then, falling apart in so many crashes of legs and arms, they will know as I know the horrors of being free.