The Repine of Captain Edward

 

The sharp and the bitter rise,
and the bleak and limitless stars show no emotion.

It is cold, always, here in the place of the living dead.

This is my tomb.  This is my coffin.  

I can exit it if I wish.  But I do not.  

I am the Mistress and this is my shrine, my shroud.  

Only you see through. 
Only you can fluidly dash silent, past my guards. 
They bend for you, hushed and blind, without demanding your purpose. 
At your feet, and with your whim, all falls silent in the furor.
You have those unbearable keys.  

Why do you love me with pulsing veins, near to bursting?

Why do you love me then despise the touch, despise the connection, fear the vast ocean?
 

On a doomed ship, are we?
 
Why care so deeply, feel so fearlessly, for moments, 

  only to fly, 

   to dash so hard against the winds you called up yourself, 

screaming out into the night, begging their full measure,

entreating them to wrap you up entirely in their sweet howls?

Cowardice will never tell. 

--Love’s depths are never plunged and absorbed by those afraid of losing it all.  

--One may touch the fabrics, 

bid them swirl around your quivering form, 

covering those erupting tremors with delicious and exquisite voices.  

--One may taste the vintage and drink it down, over the tongue’s hungry reach.
You may feel it, 

dive with it, 

only to lose the reins as it rises and swarms every limb, ravaging exquisitely.

Despite all, these corporeal dainties are but the tassels of a rich, endless expanse. 
They are mere footmen, smiling, and dutifully opening the doors of Love’s dangerous and beautiful, carpeted halls.

Afraid to live.  Afraid to die.  Languishing, are you.  

Yes, I think so.

 You touch these vibrative energies, then recoil. 
Horror-struck and timorous, but thirsty for a petrifying swell of height, you are.
So helplessly hungry for that kind of little-death that only swells when a limitless connection of energies implode and blaze,
succumbing to a chthonic rush to the depths.

You crave shuddering forth softly, hitherto rising from ransomed ashes, as these, your broken pieces live.

Oh yes, saying yes to live still, . . . again.

Regardless, these lands in which I am half-frozen and coffin-cased, are not for you, perhaps.

You worry with Titanic thoughts, hoping the iceberg will for once, be merciful.
It has none to give; verily, you are the iceberg of your own ship, my Love.

You are a careful shriek against Mother Moon.

Marvelous and aching, feeling tantalized and quickened, but not so ready as you think, to risk it all.

Yet, you captain the ship, once more into the chaos, 

Every time the ice slices, you realize what grand allure will sink and rest forever at the bottom of the very same ocean on which you bob.
Afraid of taking the wheel deliberately and guiding her into the depths to be broken and destroyed,

you stop and hang in the chains of a moment. 

I say the iceberg only yields to the fearless jump, 

the leap without worry.  

It bows only to those captains willing to risk being 

destroyed on the angry rock shores, 

the sharp, hot edges of the Le Cœur Brisé.

Alas, the dank and ageless stars still show no emotion.
I am cold, sleeping fiercely, 

waiting for the darkness to come so I may slink awake, and shiver into moonlit swathes.  

Down across the breadth and depth of a wordless nocturne

where I find Lucifer,

 Her warm hand takes hold, dancing me carelessly, 

I, a willful slave.

Waiting.

Waiting for those unbearable keys to bring me back unto life . . . .

Mori Matrem

She turns, inward. 
In the expanse of time unforgiving, she slams her sword into the hot earth,
destroying the summer sun in flaming tears, withering leaf and life, as her hands become wretched and aged.

Gathering her robes of darkness, about her she ventures forth from days of fecund abandon, the dances of seduction and smooth soft flesh, the screams of birth heard in thunderstorms, and the time-driven harvesting of her children. Her eyes, course as the dying grasses upon which she walks, see her home, across the spanse of Autumn, lying in wait, the spark of her winter soul lights the fire in its chamber, the room in which she will live and die.

Every step across her earth brings the cold winds, their burgeoning gales growing, mercilessly whipping the tattered dress she once wore anew, now faded, replaced by the cape of the Old Woman.  Where she once spun her body into a seductive frenzy, the dance coursing through her veins like vapoured drunkeness, she now feels the ache of time, the stiffening of her limbs, and the cold of her blood, growing.  In need of shelter she walks onward, wrapped tight, her robes cover the dress of her waning youth, losing its threaded beauty, falling away from her with every step into the turn of her season, the winter winds blow her onward.

Memories of her youth are filled by shadows, and her mind recalls them with storied smiles.  And by her hearth, she finally settles, picking up the staff of age and tales left untold, she begins the stirring of her cauldron, each tinkling sound of the potion within brings further the chill of night.
The Sun, once so youthful and virile, the fire of her passions, fails.  He dies and is ferried to the Summerlands where she will once again meet him with the return of the Light.

For now, she begins her vigil of death.  Pulling the snows from the gathering clouds, she weaves the land with her white blanket of winter.  All things die or nestle into her old body, hiding from her failing memory, the voice which once called her to bring forth life and light from her body of earth.  

She forgets, now. Quite purposefully her memory is consumed by each stirring of the cauldron.  Her desire only to smile and gather her limbs to the fire of her hearth, warming her fading body as she recounts tales with a smile under her wild hair, grey and silver, lying in chaos across her shoulders.Her eyes may fade into frost, but they sparkle brightly with every numbered breath she takes, and in ice and frost, her rooms become a grave.  She will never leave them. In her failing form, the winter’s long night eclipses her strength, In a bed with no warmth she lies, eyes transfixed by the candle she lit only days ago, now burning its last flames.With her final breath she weaves a spell, speaking with a booming soul a voice thunders across the cold earth, running through the veined roots of the evergreens which never die, she imparts one last command to her sleeping children, swaddled in the earth, the seeds of new life.  She bids them to rise with the coming Sun, to bring forth life again when her daughter, her self, rises from the silent tomb of winter. They will live again,She will live again.In the smoke of death she smiles, and looks into the chasm of darkness.  Peering forward, taking the reaper’s arm, she steels herself and walks into oblivion.The winter swallows the earth she leaves behind.All things cease and slow.Rhythms of life are arrested.  Waiting for the clarion call of Spring, they watch as she walks into spiraling mists, and disappears.No laments for their Great Mother pierce the silent snows.  Only the call of wolfen voices split the night, crying to the moon, asking for her touch once more, grieving her loss, the song of the heart shattered by the cold of her absence.

The silent earth sleeps.  The Yule fires fade. She lies down in her own grave and smiles as Death covers her. 
She will sleep deeply and dreamless, the dead bones of those who she birthed into life, nestled close, surrendering to the silent snows. 

All becomes cold and quiet. 
Life awaits.
She gives herself over and is swept away into the rushing waters of Time. 

Her dance is ended.

~G.

Ismene

The days bring an exhaustion of the soul.

Her eyes fade in to walls of comfort that may also cage a heart, once free.

Words of phantoms temper the stars of her firmament, and in an ocean of light-filled darkness, she stirs and corrodes.

Can you see my soul hanging from these gallows?

Do you see how she takes the rope from your hands and loosens the coil, the hard knots of lifetimes, the rage of a thousand volts,

infected with sadness, the despair of lips murmuring to

the Nothing.

Rushing madness, blink for years, hold on to moments.
Let go, they say.  Slough off the tears, let them sting your eyes filled with bewildering pain, no longer.
Cut the rope, slip the stream of consciousness forward.
In the spin of it all, grasp and clench with all deliberate knowing, what you have spoken to others in those soft times.
If your legs have been cut from under you, grow new ones. 
The others were tired of carrying a Queen of Ages, a woman with children she has never seen,
a quiet prophet of sorrow and fierce whispers.  ~G.
Image by Kathy Fornal https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/kathy-fornal

Ophelia Breathes

Under a cool blanket of Night, I am made of  mists and moonbeams.
Communing with nothing more than my own sense of life, more alive after dusk,
My mind ambles aimless, listing in each moment,
willingly carried aloft by the libertine sincerity of starlight.
Interrupt fades in,
and slips past my awareness, so draped am I across these moments.
Abrupt and alluring, its protrusion into this space asks no permission,
Nor does it give so much as a by your leave.  
It simply begins with the plucking of a recollection, and I am flashed backward across hours, days, weeks.
Scented breezes, crisp in evening-bloomed fragrances strike a recollection of Her.
And, at once, time and space halt, and into the pause of this memory, she returns,
Slowly moving into my body, her feet traverse on the taste of minted lips and eucalyptus.
In these moments, nothing moves but her,
the Moon, chained around her wrist, peers downward  in its own pleasure,

as her vision takes over my being.
Her shroud is soft light, her hair wild and piercing, blending like a knife blade into the colors around her.
Leaving behind how and on what magick she returned, my eyes, fevered and rushing with burgeoning moisture flood with her mastery of my senses.
With a simple beckon of her plunging gaze, she enters my body of memory and we dance, again.
Visions swirl, and I reel with her, against her, through her.

Control is now an illusion, and I take leave of my senses.
She authors these moments by the merest whim,
Dictating them to me, a heady verse dripping with an exquisite hunger,
prismed through her own version of the Divine.
My form is no longer my own.   It melts into her forming a familiar entity composed of two.
Her voice becomes my voice,
my breath flows from hers.
Hearts swirl around each other, circling, spiraled into the song written by Infinity when the Universe was young.
A wordless symphony begins to rise over the din of collision.   It is raised up aloft into the still night air, meandering behind the lift of our bodies.
Expression unbound from speech.
Heat, the raspy tension of a timeless ache, begging madly to be released,
crying to set itself free into the fiery chamber our forms create.
Lips speak into each other without need of phonetic chains,
a flavour of touch,
a rich and velvety taste of her luscious frenzy,
Sounds from my throat voice what words fail to reveal.
And so it begins . . .
The table set,
Eat your fill, and this tale will drag you along behind.  
It will skin you alive in pleasure, chop your clarity into pieces and drop those over the edge of the jagged cliffs with a laughter far removed from sanity.

These moments ride me like goddesses.  
She takes the helm of my resolve; I am a wind shear in her hand.
Lucidity, gone in a whoosh.  
The room is emptied of air, and beauty consumed in her flames.
Blown backward into the walls with a merciless force flown at my soul by her searing gaze,
impassioned throes nail the slave to her altar.  

Caveat.  
You must become what you read from here,  in order to join the mystery of her,
the mystery of us,
a vortex of two souls who have seen each other so long and so completely, they have forgotten more about each other than most will ever know of someone else.

I make no promise of your sane return.  
If my Muse allows, you shall see clearly again.
Pray she feels generous, this night.

I speak to her, from this point forward, the event horizon of her memory that hence floods all that I am.

--- I have no more composure, now.

--- Steady yourself, Foolish One.   This isn’t your Dear, Sainted Mother’s Merry-Go-Round . . .

See through my eyes as images blur . . .

Down you go.  

Eyes, misted.  

Thirst and the swirling dusts of a moon too far away . . .

The honey of a memoried fountain spilling over the touch of my fingertips,

And down into the chasm of my own dry places.

Cracks in the earth of my desert grab with clenching hunger, the

thundering cascade

of you,

drinking you down like a supernova,

flung backward into primal and ache,

whip-driven madness seeking only to slake the thirst for the tsunami

whose inundation breaks over your thighs and into my lips,

All at once and with a madness of abandon.

One cannot even pen thoughts, the world is spun so into a twist of passion.

I am a screaming lock whose kiln-fired body is maddened by a ravenous

need for the key

that is you.

Here, lies a wild and gaping grip in my teeth to feel your silvered push

into the recesses of that lock's shadows,

and the mask-exploding annihilation of as many layers of rusted ache,

blown apart, surged upward and away

by a flick of your wrist that stirs the tumblers . . .

Consciousness is a parched floor set on fire by the searing fuel,

consuming my throat in soft insanity . . .

a flicker of flame that singes the skin of my lips,

but only warming them with a rushing rip,

in the same way the graze of a shotgun blast warms the surface that it

kisses with an opulent and exquisite obliteration.

Oh yes, to be sure of it, I want you with each vibrative shiver

of every reverberation.  

Every note struck upon those bells ringing between my heart and lungs,

knows your name.

They announce it upon the waking hour,

fervently threading it purposefully into the shadows,

fabricking those tapestries into a most tempered mist,

hanging their shimmer like a moon in my own heart.

*Exhale . . .*

Still lying between her smooth, twitching knees,

Poetess rests her head upon the Muse’s belly,

a voice still quietly humming with effervescent music,

wordless and soft.

The room’s hanging dust scattered about only

by the impassioned sounds

of a woman's simmering crave for the air Muse breathes

into her very body.

This sweetness and sting bringing it to life,

in a splendor of colour and flash.

Floating, buffered in dew,

I am suspended in her fragrance still kissed upon my lips,

pitching and poured out into pockets of air

which partition the very molecules, of the waxing night.

Floating . . . floating . . . floating . . . floating . . . floating . . . away . . .

-g.

Image Credit:
"Ophelia" 
Inspired by John Everett Millais
By Kerry Darlington