Split

Before names were carved in stone,
Before iron tasted blood,
The people of the green places danced with Death.

They crowned themselves with leaves and berries,
Bared their skin to bark and thorn,
Welcomed Death into the circle,
Winter feared, honored, worn.

Death came then in borrowed shape,
Bone wrapped in moss and swords,
Watched and counted and learned the rhythm,
Of breath, of laughter, of the world.

And for a long age, the world was whole.

But hunger crept in people’s heart,
They looked at Death and saw a gate,
They asked how much, how soon, how long,

How long a body could endure?
How many lives be bound together?
What if the boundary was torn?

They broke the circle.
They stole the instruments of Death,
And Death responded.

Bodies welded into one,
Mouths fed without filling,
Death walked on hills of bodies and called itself living.

Storms screamed and split the skies.
Roots recoiled from the soil.
The world cracked.
From the wound spread white veins of ruin,
Branching beneath forests and cities alike.

Death no longer dances.
The wild remembers.

So, I implore you, wanderer beloved,
Do not ask how much life can be taken,
Only how it should be released.

The Forest, the Blood

Roots creak.
Forgotten gods.
The trees here do not sway with the wind.
They move their pale-barked limps, only when no one is looking.

Selene,
huntress of the pale moon,
stalks the silent stars.
Her bow strung,
her hair plucked from her own dreams.
By her side,
the hound who remembered being a man.

Kneeling in the soil,
a circle of smoke and bone,
weeping salt and ash.

Before her,
the goblin-thing.
Its voice,
a wet scrape across her soul.

«Give me what you treasure,»
it hisses.

She holds up her own heart.

In the shadows,
her dead brother watches.
Waiting to be loved.
Waiting to be named.

A demon sprouts from tangled roots.
She plunges her hand in his chest.
Her arm blackens,
from corruption,
grief,
righteousness,
vengeance,
the slow, dumb ache of her sour purpose.

How good it is,
to understand one another.
Desire for desire,
Thought for thought.

The people burn red candles and lock their doors at dusk.
The Wolf walks again.
Yellow-eyed,
cloaked in night.
A hunger in skin.

Selene waits,
Arrow drawn,
barefoot on the black shore.

She does not want to be a burden,
but gods,
she wants someone to carry her.
Just for a little while.

The Wolf hears her and stops.

They both look toward the burning horizon,
before the ghost of a once-great tree.
She wears a mask of feathers,
he wears a crown of thorns.

There is so much newness that can’t be named.
They will wait.

Gaze into forest,
ocean,
into the great beneficence of this splendor.
And wait.
Clarity will come.

The Bloom and the Bleeding

The world no longer turned in innocence.

The stars had fallen.
Fruit.

The stones whispered the names of extinct flowers.

A dead god’s eyes,
left open,
pulsing with the light of blue constellations.

Coral-pink, marble columns rose.
Petrified screams.

Winged, half-dressed phantoms fluttered in the scented air of oblivion.
Angels.
No.
Not angels.
Mutations of desire and memory.
The Court of the Hundred Blossoms, they called themselves.

AGNES.
BEATRICE.
EURYDICE.

They held no love.
They only longed.
Endlessly.

Taking turns,
they sat atop a pollen-dusted throne,
atop rust and reflection.

Whoever sat there,
wore a crown of withered orchids bleeding sap into their eyes.

The Court adored them with the ferocity of a species on the brink.

They remembered the old world.
Grass trembling with solar light.
Worms whispering words of woe.

The latest supplicant,
the silent figure in a rebreather mask,
bearing rust where skin once lived,
was asked:

“Do you love this world?”

The mask fell,
revealing a cavity with glowing threads.
Nerves, perhaps.
Perhaps, music.

Perhaps an unreleasable scream.

The grass recoiled,
hissed.

The Court wept honey.

A ship orbited an eye.
Its lid was atmosphere.
Its lashes were storm-hung skies.

The Archivist painted in oils that boiled in vacuum.
Her latest canvas was a cryo-chamber.

Inside, the last knight of blight.
On his left shoulder, a coat of arms in white flowers blooming.
On his left shoulder, white rot bloomed.

Outside, she clutched eternal spheres of truth,
blind in the stone vigil.

Truth is the most sculpted thing of all.

A girl with too many eyes,
gathered white and pink flowers,
hurried,
half-dressed,
barefoot,
because she feared the beasts under the earth,
but also,
because she adored the lush trembling of petals between her fingers.

Softly, she clutched them to her chest.
Softly, she exclaimed their dearness,
Softly, she knew they would be nothing, forever.

Above her, the fake sun blinked.

Below her, the real soil writhed.

The Church of the Harvested Soul had always claimed it was oppressed.
Though, it burned entire cities of moss-witches and composted children into nutrient slurry for their god-engine.

When the wind cried foul,
they screamed:

“We are victims of the green tyranny!”

And they always found new ways to appropriate,
co-opt,
manipulate,
taking the language of blooming,
twisting it to justify their sterilization of entire meadows.
“We burn only in defense,” they said.
“The roots were reaching for our babies.”

But the roots remembered.

And they were coming.

Half-goat, half-memory.
The Heretic fished in the mirror lake.
His net was woven with sinew and curse.
He hauled a silver fish.

“I longed for you,” he whispered to it.

It replied, “Why did you make me?”

Open books.
Weeping vines.
A child was learning to walk by reading with their feet.
Stories and endings.

To live,
is a miracle.

To walk on the green Earth,
breathing,
bloody,
is the only true rebellion.

In the end,
the stars will crack,
like eggshells.
From them,
monsters will hatch,
to punish,
and mourn.

Postscript, etched in bark and teeth:

We are all alone.
Born alone.
Die alone.
But in the garden,
we bloom together.

Taurus

In the beginning, there were many worlds.
Thin worlds. Black worlds.
They converged.

Then there was one bigger world.
One black world.
Thicker, too.
Also, long.
It went on and on.
Twisting, turning.
Until the hole.

Was it a gutter, or pleasure’s shore?
Who knows?
I don’t.

What’s known is this:
It stood on twisted legs.
Fat legs. Black legs.

But this was not a black world.
Not anymore.
No, it was pink.
I think.
Or mauve.

After that, it went to shit.
A labyrinth inside swollen mammaries.
Excreting reverse tears, back into eyes.

Into a lake of many eyes.
Not of this world.
Looking out of this world.
Green eyes, inside blue waters, inside green mountains, inside blue skies…

But, back to the world.
While it transformed.
It got ears, eyes, and horns.
A face.
A black face.
With blue eyes.

And in that face, another face.
A blue face. With black eyes.

And all the eyes were looking at me.
Eyes from faces, eyes from lakes.
Asking me to create worlds.
Many worlds.

So, in the end, there were many worlds.

Feast of the Solivagant

–an epic of weird and visceral gastronomy

The abyssopelagic stillness murders sunlight, and breathes a banquet.
Four tables stretch beyond sight,
Heavy with brine.
On their writhing quadrivium, geometry forgets itself.
There is a sound of sibilance,
A hiss of hunger,
A soft C shifting sour.

The deipnosophist arrives first,
Smiling a diaphanous curtain of etiquette.
He speaks of marrow broths
boiled from the bones of limerent saints,
of matutinal gluttony beneath blood-orange dawns.
He does not eat.
He only tells.
With incendiary words,
searing, oilset tongues.

A pot-valiant knight lumbers in next,
Flushed with fermented dreamfruit.
His breastplate clangs with jentacular remnants,
Eggs boiled in the sweat of fevered gods.
He laughs,
Cachinnates,
Then stabs a slab of unknown flesh
That redames his gluttony beneath his fork.

The acersecomic child sits on a high-backed chair of cartilage.
Hair snakes down in thick, choking ropes.
Her eyes,
Opsimath orbs of late-bloomed wisdom,
recogitate every movement.
She watches the meat breathe.
She watches the meat think.

Then comes the agathokakological thing,
Composed of hands and hooves,
Languor and lightning,
Its finger’s edges scripturient,
Full of mouths murmuring recipes.
The cacography of hunger scribbles across the walls:
Spells in spastic strokes,
Menus of mellow madness.
Patrizate demons echo chefs long devoured,
Cleavers swung with ancestral might.
Bêtise is no longer error,
but a course between the entrées.
It brings the centerpiece:
A solivagant abomination,
Glazed in black molasses,
Stuffed with a heart still beating,
Still dreaming of its noctivagant endeavors,
Through butchered hills,
Through spice-thick winds.

The air turns sweet with peccability.
One may sin,
But only if the dish requires it.

And now, you—
Yes, you—
Are the final course.

Do you not feel it?
The sauce congealing on your spine?
The fork tonguing your thoughts?

Come, dear guest.
Join the feast.
It has been waiting,
Since the first hunger
Swallowed a scream.

This is what I know

This is what I know:
Stories are embers that refuse to die
in the breath of those
who dare to speak them,
dancing between truth
and the dream of a lie.

Pirates carve the flesh of the sea,
the tides,
whispering curses and silver-laced songs,
drinking deep from the wells of the storms,
never drowning,
never home for too long.

There are beings of fire,
hunger,
and light,
consumers of worlds in furious gleams,
and beings of sadness,
softness,
and ice,
crawling the depths of their quiescent dreams.

There is death without tears,
coldness unbowed,
silences vast for a cry to disturb,
and scriptures of tears for death,
—oh, so loud—
that they shatter the stars with the weight of each word.

And magick—oh, magick—woven in ink,
in rustles,
in laughter,
in sorrow and rage,
in spells,
in forgetting,
in stories,
in drink,
in the turning of time, of page, of dying,
in the fate of becoming,
in the sentence of being.

Yes, this is what I know:
Stories are embers that refuse to die.
They burn,
they consume,
they weep,
they ignite—
But, often, too often, they stay trapped inside.

The Gambler’s Hollow

He rode in, dust-bitten,
pockets lined with tarnished silver,
eyes burning under a sun-bleached hat.
Cards snapped, whiskey swirled,
the house always had its fill—
but never enough for him.

The dice called him brother,
the deck shuffled with lies,
the weight of his purse
rose and fell like the tide.
A king at dusk,
a pauper by dawn.
His laughter turned to curses,
his curses turned to prayers,
and his prayers,
turned to nothing.

He lost the last of it.
Coins rattled in other hands.
His own, empty now,
cracked, curling, reaching for something,
anything, to make him whole.

He wandered full of nothing,
shoes full of dust,
heart full of rage.
Loss sharpened his hunger,
not for money—no, never just money—
but for the feeling.
The chase, the risk, the game.
He was the hound. The rabbit.
The blood in the dust.

Trees.
Roots deep, branches stretched to the sky.
No numbers,
no wealth.
Only umbrage,
and lull.

A stray dog followed him one night,
ribs sharp, eyes soft.
It licked his fingers, tasted his hunger,
and gave him nothing in return—
but company.
He should have kicked it away.
He didn’t.

The river croaked,
slick bodies slid under the moon.
Eyes,
wide,
waiting,
endless.
They needed nothing.
He hated them for it.

One night, luck kissed his hand.
He won.
Again.
And again.
Gold piled, the weight of it,
familiar,
but hollow.
The hunger shrank,
the greed remained.

He stopped chasing.
He didn’t need to anymore.
No more dice, no more risk.
Just counting.
Measuring.
Owning.
His fingers traced the edges of wealth.

And without hunger,
without fire,
he felt nothing at all.

A ghost remembered him.
A man with dead eyes and a bullet in his gut.
A man who once begged him
for the last of his coins.
Begged him for mercy.
A man he had laughed at.
A man now laughing back.

The ghost came in nightmares.
It took his warmth,
left him cold in golden sheets.

The bouncer knew him,
and did not care.
A shadow in an alley,
a fist like a hammer.
The gambler hit the ground,
and the ground welcomed him home.
Ribs cracked, blood pooled,
and he felt something at last—
pain.

In his final breath,
the dice rolled one last time,
and he thought—

Of dirt under his nails.
Of morning sun on green fields.
Of the weight of a shovel in his hands.
Of a few coins in his pocket.
Just enough.
Just enough.

The Horned Huntress Hungers

Slick with night’s dark blue spit,
the land drinks the cold.
Black lines of conifers,
bone-ribbed,
needle-fanged,
grief-spined,
and vein-twisted,
gnaw at the horizon’s throat.

A woman kneels,
coaxing fire from splintered bone.
The flame emerges screaming,
vomits light into the corpse-air.

She feels it.

The Gaze.

It crawls up her spine,
a gaze with a hundred tiny legs,
skitters between ribs,
gnaws at marrow.
She does not turn.
She knows.

A man walks from the trees,
one of the dead.
His shadow bends,
it writhes,
it fractures,
it starves,
and it devours.
Half his face is ember-lit,
the other—
a messenger of something wrong.

He extends a hand.
Smoke curls from his fingertips.
Not the fire.
Not the cold.
Something else burns him.

The trees tremble.
The beast watches.

Its horns rake through power lines—
fireflies burst caught mid-scream.
It does not blink.
It does not breathe.

The night grows red.
Above,
the swollen moon sways—
pregnant,
vast,
terrible,
dreaming,
thrashing,
aching to be the Sun.

Whorls

The Veil
I move but I do not move.
The ground,
if there is one,
shifts beneath me.
All around,
the color of closed eyes,
the weight of tears,
the slow collapse.
No purpose.
No time.
No end.

I reach, but my fingers do not know touch.
I speak, but the words are swallowed.
Here is the origin of silence.
Here absence curls into my veins,
and I am a thing drifting,
adrift,
adrift.

Thrum
A sound.

A whisper of motion.
A stirring,
a tremor,
the air being torn.

Wings.
A hush,
a sigh,
a slow insistence,
a deepening drum.

I know they are close.
Somewhere in the heavy dark,
something flies.
Its beating,
its constant rising—
it does not stop.
It grows.
It grows.

Clutch
The darkness breaks in ribbons.
Coiling tendrils,
white smoke,
lace torn from a dream.
They do not fall; they twist,
reaching,
reaching—
I do not want them to reach me.

Hands.
Soft fingers.
A touch on the wrist,
a palm pressing my chest,
an embrace,
a grip—
they hold,
they squeeze,
they steal the movement from my limbs.

Silence worse than screams.
White that has not light.
They are white but they are not warmth.
They are the pallor of things left too long in the dark.
And I know,
if I let them,
they will keep me.

So I fight.
I tear,
I twist,
I break.
I run from the pale hush of their hold,
I escape,
they collapse,
they dissolve,
they dissolve.

The Gate, The Eye, The Light That is Not Seen
It opens.

A cleft in the black,
a vertical slit.
Not a wound.
Not a maw.
An eye—
watching,
watching.
A gate—
waiting,
waiting.

I advance.

I do not see light.
Still,
I know it’s there.
I feel it against my skin,
a pulse,
a radiance.
I do not know its color,
but something inside me names it—
Yellow.

Yellow that hums,
yellow that soothes.
Yellow that does not demand,
yellow that is.
The warmth of a flame.
The quiet stretch of dawn.
The shimmer of pollen drifting in a summer breeze.
A blush of sunlight touching mountain peaks.
A flicker.
A mellow sheen.
A honeyed glaze.
The ripe swell of a peach.
The sunflower.
The dune.
It does not pull me.
It does not push me.
I exist within it.

I close my eyes.
The darkness is still there.
I let go.
And I do not fall.
I do not fall.
I fall.

Black

Black,
in myriad forms, a cloak of endless hues,
Atramentous shadows bleed into the edges of my sight,
the charcoal sketch of a dying day,
a dying planet,
a dying world,
its ember-soft remains against the duskiness of the sky.

Coal lies buried deep,
smirched by the weight of time,
inky veins,
midnight rivers of what’s forgotten,
flowing beneath the crust of eons.
A pitch-thick silence hangs,
funereal smoke drifts,
from singed dreams and ashen hopes.

Sable night, swathed in swarthiness,
an obsidian sheen reflects my sombrous heart.
The niello of stars burns faintly,
silver smirks against my melanotic skin.
And the raven, with wings of denigration,
cuts through this inkiness,
a fleeting shadow across the moon’s pale face.

Swartness lingers,
tar-like,
clinging to breath and thought.
It is the soot of forgotten fires,
the ebony truth that loiters
long after the flame.

Once, the crows spoke of melanism,
their voice a funereal hymn to the sloe fruit’s bitter bite,
the kind that stains lips with its essence.
Even the smoke whispers of this:
the ink of words left unwritten,
the obsidian shards of dreams.

There is beauty in this world,
in the raven-black canopy of stars,
in the singe of forgotten coal,
in the darksomeness of wild things.
Ebony branches claw at the sky,
by a dusky sun that fades into jet-streaked horizons.

Darkness is not emptiness;
it is the fullness of mystery.
A sombrous smoke that curls upward
like a prayer,
unanswered,
but still offered.

Black is a world entire,
a raven’s cry in a midnight forest,
a smirch that marks the soul
and makes it whole.