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 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.

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.

To Woden

Your Messengers guided my walk,
Not just the two,
There was a whole murder of them.
Through the fog, through the dew,
Each bearing wisdom’s precious gem.

With wings as black as midnight chalk,
In skies of stormy hue,
They charted course, a broken helm,
Through tempests, through the squawk,
To shores of insight, ever new.

A murder, yet no crime they plot,
In unity, they overwhelm,
With lessons death has dearly bought,
And knowings, piercing through.