Like a daemon, it cursed Zephyr and Aeolus for such antiquity.

Here was the newest depravity, it claimed.

Was the body to slowly die. To give up in honor, there was a great pause in the air. A stifled whoosh of air as the stones tumbled down and the knife with the antler handle slid so seamlessly in. With the rivulets and rivers and bloodied streams that cascaded out. And down, there was the entrance. This pathway was the most ancient, the most dire. The most divine of all the ways and in the blood-letting, your body knew no slaughter.

In the arms of sacrifice, there is no dehumanizing, there is nothing senseless and there is no such thing as murder. No villain to pursue, there was only the divine to gaze down upon and the essence to live up. To. There was the soul that escaped through parted lips and I caressed as it moved, as it floated upwards. To touch for the last time the parts of you that I felt inside of me in the quiet of the night.

You were my secret sonnet and my wayshower. The one who held the key and unlocked the doorways and hidden pathways to god.

With this child inside, I could not hold onto myself. There was a panic that spread like crumbling teeth from my mouth and I wanted to run. Far, to run so far and there was no place to go but to look around. The walls were burning. A great conflagration in a sea of souls wailing. And he sat there with his smirk in the shadows and smoked a cigar. Licked his lips, he did, as he sneered and smiled and gave me one big long look.

Like I was the one who was all wrong. I brought myself to this place, for this child, she could not know a way out. There was no way out and she didn’t know where to go. To hide. So I brought her to this burning island, this burning pedestal in the middle of the ocean. Despite the squalls and the stormy skies, there was only ash and flame and torn wall paper.

And him.

Staring, like some hungry wolf with a lesson to learn. A lesson to teach. Instead of closing my eyes, I closed hers and ran into the flames and ignited.

This desolation is something I could not bear. The whiteness was merely a contrast to the depths I could only see. There was a fear to dive too deeply and to finally see the hidden parts of me. So I shuffled along with a limp and a cane to catch my fall. It was covered in blood and my hands were covered in callouses. There was nothing here for me anymore. I could not catch the eyes from leaking and my hair was being yanked in great, heaving tugs. I strangled myself here. In the desert, I strangled myself not for want of water but for a want of soul. This great life-quenching thing.

There was no great life-giving banyan tree here nor even a cactus to whither away under my touch. Just this bloody branch with brambles to catch my fall and my feet to trip and my ankles to roll. If not to break, I could not feel anything move asunder. Like shifting continental plates, I wore those tatters on my shoulders. Maps, they were my history, a mere glimpse as the jungles beneath my eyes. Hidden, there was life beyond the decay and I could no longer bear to escape it.

And the veil, with the gossamer threads, wove its way around and down and fell to the floor. Cradled the feet as she stripped herself. Exposed, the flesh she moved changed and rippled in the moonlight and she laughed with deep eyes that drank the sky in. She wore the golden crown over her head and she tasted her own lips.

Too nimble, too supple. Too tender to lick, she was the dancing mystery that fled through the sky and left shifts. The reddening silks that stained the ground.

Adorned, he placed a value on his robes with their white billowing trails. A linen, he wore the scarab upon his throat and it crawled like a machine, up and down and up and down and excreted feces on his stomach. It rolled down, and stained his clothes but he never noticed. He never, ever looked down and the beetle, with its metallic armor, rolled on. Crawled on and chink-chinked its way around and down and all over. Like nails, it clanked.

… tinkled.

He stank. He smelled of the feces but only tasted the blood.

To walk, there were the secret, hidden places where nothing touched. The dust was the acre and the milestones were and few between. He smiled with a sneer and coal eyes that died, in sparkling a sparkling death. To suck in, he would stare and take long, long drinks of soul and grind his teeth at the end. A savory thing, he climbed the skies with his nails and cut them jagged on the peaks.

And the hearse rolled up with the black windows, all chrome and shiny with frost. All over. There was frost and voices from the inside that cast their own phantoms against the mirror. Yes, they were the painted, the pastel, the stained glass windows filled-to-brimming with geometric shapes.

I could not shake these thoughts, these visions on the tip of eyes in the middle of the night. To awaken, with the floor on the cieling and the wraith hanging overhead as the black man, the shadow watched on. He never moved.

In the walking, the hallways became more narrow and the tree branches folded in upon themselves.  With my fingers, I found the braille to lead me the way. With the salty-sweet sprays and the bitter-wind leaves whipping, slapping my legs like the backs of a dog’s legs.

I am such a whithering thing with old juice cumming down my legs. With the blinded leading the blind and the miserable suturing the future away.  There is a way out of here, a way to seek the answers and fumble softly over the stones’ patchwork inlay. There, the ground held fortresses of a giant decay, of stumbling machinations, I walked like the child-lover gone away. A lost thing. A silent love of the leaves in my head and the wind that whisked such fancy away.

Oh, my mind, the heart’s surrender. This blindness played such beautiful tricks and the winds, they carried the scent of my own decay. This salty, this sweaty, this bumbling betrayal. There was an ocean out there and the winds kept carrying it to me. Those grains, they caught my feet and my heart seared the memory of you and me.

There.

And there was the great death sigh of the million little grains of sand that came together. To hug, they were the formed together giants of the world with its metal spine and topiary top, of shingles and wood and dead maggots and black flies. Oh, the sky was a darkening mass with its storm clouds and god rays that pushed they way, through. Through to the center. Of the doorway, that was the center.

With the turquoise paint chips and million other little drops of garbage, of city dew. Of fresh death decayed and trembling. These skeletons were the fractions of self that decimated underneath footsteps that fell just a little too hard. The echo, yes, that was something.

And stared. With the dark eyes with no emotion. A lifeless look with the furrowed intensity of the blind.
He haunted.