Snow

you are sixteen when your decorate her casket with dirt.

you are violent. you are selfish. you are cruel. and though your bones rot with the cruelty of winter, you find the hole in your heart growing. you taste the salt of your tears as they decorate your ivory cheeks; and you feel a pain that sinks through your bloodstream. it is hot, and you shiver from your own discomfort. it singes the corpses of your bones; burns your fingertips and is so unfamiliar that it spreads through you like a wildfire.

your third eldest sister was twenty years old when she withered into her bones and became a fragment of your discarded memories.

it was the first time you'd ever experienced loss; and it burned a hole in your chest that you selfishly covered with your own sin.

you are sixteen when he covers you on your itchy sheets.

you are violent. you are selfish. you are cruel. the winter of your bones gnaws at him, at his warmth, and his kindliness. he stinks of pine; and his fingernails are clean and his knuckles unbruised. he is careful, he is kind, and he is gentle. you fight with released claws; but he yields to you like a dog yields to it's owner.

you pierce his skin with your teeth, and he yelps.

"how can you be so cruel?" he cries, before disappearing into the heat of mid-summer; leaving you clumsy and crumpled in your sheets.

you are barely still sixteen when he takes the worn corners of your jaw between the calloused bends of his weathered fingers. he presses his lips to yours so forcefully that it turns your lips white, like the winter of your stale blood, and he doesn't taste sweet. he tastes like the grit between your eyelids, and he tastes like the frost of winter.

he yields to you, too. but he is different. he is a child of snow, a child of winter; captured within the hooks of your jealous thumbs. his hands are selfish as they trace the roadmaps of your veins, track your cartography to his skull. he fills the winter between your ribs with a fearsome fire and singes your selfish fingertips.

you leave traces of your wild carnations like an oil painting along the slender slope of his arched back.
he becomes your canvass, and for once you fill the void of your dilapidated heart. for once you don't mind the fire that fills your bones. for once you don't care for equality, or loneliness, or the insignia's you'd etched into the wooden desk.

he leaves you in the morning, crumpled into your itchy sheets, with watermarks on your ivory cheeks. the winter within you seizes you once more; and you remain a child of the snow.
you are violent. you are selfish. you are cruel.

Summer

seven am was full of heartbreak.

you are eight years old.

you sit behind the oak door in an ivory nightgown your mother bought for you with weighted coins. your purple knees are crossed, your bare feet dirty with the grit that settled between the floorboards. you scrub relentlessly at the spaces between your bruised knuckles, biting your tongue in preventing your curiosity from escaping.

your eldest sister returns to the oak door in the birth of the new morning. her fingers shake as they grip the foundation of the door frame, each movement more hesitant then the next. she reeks of sex and sin, the span of her ivory skin decorated with his bruises. her brilliant blue pools are darker, and a hand flutters to her throat when she notices her you on the floor.

"you can not be foolish, sister." she lectures, punctuated fingertips drifting to the curve of your plump, red cheek. "you must be prepared and you must always be brave."

eight pm is full of joy.

you are eleven years old.

you sit behind the oak door in a knitted, purple sweater your sister bought for you with weighted coins. your rosy knees are crossed, your bare feet dirty with the product of the pavements of the schoolyard. you scrub relentlessly at the faces of your blued fingernails, biting your tongue in preventing your opinions from escaping.

your second eldest sister returns to the oak door in the dead of the night. her fingers are confident and brash as they grip the foundation of the door frame, each movement more erratic then the next. she radiates the perfume of sex and sin, the span of her ivory skin decorated with his shadows of his fingers. her brilliant green pools are overjoyed, and a hand flutters to her stomach when she notices you on the floor.

"you must be agreeable, sister." she sings, brash fingertips floating to the hollow of your thick, shortened neck. "you must be happy and you must always do as your told."

twelve pm is full of content.

you are fifteen years old.

you sit behind the oak door in an oversized, army jacket you bought for yourself with weighted coins. your grayed knees are crossed, your bare feet dirty with the nights spent within the hearth of the store. you scrub relentlessly at the lines that decorate your hands, biting your tongue in preventing your anger from escaping.

your third eldest sister returns to the oak door in the refreshing daze of afternoon. her fingers are quiet and careful as they caress the foundation of the door frame, each movement more placid then the next. she releases the accessory of sex and love, the span of her ivory skin decorated with his kisses. her brilliant chocolate pools are calm, and a hand flutters to her heart when she notices you on the floor.
"you are perfect, sister." she murmurs, delicate fingertips floating to the dimple of your forehead. "you must be patient and it will find you. and it will not be selfish, or cruel."

Winter

you are born with a cavity in your chest.

a hole where your heart should be. you decorate your thin, blued lips with roses, and you plump your hollowed cheeks with sun-haze. but it can not cure the winter of your bones; the corpses that dance between your ribs. because you are born with caskets tied to your ankles, and anchors tethered to your limbs that drag you further, and further, and further until you drown.

you inscribe your words into wood; bonded to the collective darkness that bandages your heart as if vulnerability is your wound. sometimes, there is too much heat. your bruised fingertips are singed by the fire that blooms from their chests, and you find yourself recluse again. an oddity among mankind. 

you are born with the snow. you are born and offered to winter, as a newborn with scrambling limbs and muffled screams. you are cruel as a child; you pick at scabs and count the undertones of your hampered breathing patterns as a remedy for the violence that is bred within your bones. you grow into a lonely thing. 

you are a wild child born to women with crossed hands and bowed heads; a brevity of confidence where there had once been none. you refuse to be of them, shake their stories from your skull, erasing the lullabies they'd planted in your heart. you wanted a cacophony - the brilliance of dysphoria as it paints it's way across your membrane. in the heart of the night, you crawl under itchy sheets and promise that you will empty your veins of them: refuse to be restrained and softened into a peach that is made impure by a man's hands. 

you are the divided myth of a broken household, a fragment of the father you never knew and the ghost of a mother who had long since passed. you are violent, you are cruel, and you are selfish. you are not bound by your bruised knees or your dirty knuckles.

Sting

The creature murmurs their defeat as he whimpers through the dinned streets.

There are welts on his pelt; savage lines cut cruelly across his pale skin, embellished with the amber thickness of his own poison, as it seeps down the concave of his hollow, ivory cheek. He wears them proudly, like trophies thrown upon him like a victor: because that's what he was. A victor. He relished in the secrets pried between their warm bones: melted his skin to theirs and pried them apart with bloodied fingers, until they were a pool of their own misfortune. They whispered their secrets to him, as well as their mercies – they're prayers mumbled to unforgiving ears in the breadth of the forgotten evenings. But he does not pity them, as a wolf does not pity it's prey.

Twin limbs exude weariness as he scrambles in the shadows of the dimly lit corridors; haunted by the brick walls as they enclose him, press his flesh from wall to wall until he almost screams. He is delirious with his own exhaustion, with his own joy, that he tumbles about – his fangs weak as they pierce against ivory and crumble miserably.

It was his own wrong doing. His own curiosity brought it's violent fingers across the arch of his back and scolded him, left imprints on his skin that marred the impossible beauty of his charred face. The slant of his defined jaw was highlighted by the maroon liquid that rested there, and he wore it as a warrior wore his paint to war – with a cruel sense of pride. Fangs bore as he sauntered, and he thought once more of their remains: mangled, and brilliant and beautiful, and he was filled with another bout of ecstatic joy that crippled him at the hinges of his severed torso.

He loved death so wholly and so unwittingly, that he had married himself too it. He had caught his fingers with a golden band, and he had wed himself to the discrepancy of death. Unutterable vowels conjugated from his morphed lips; but all that emerged was a gurgle that decorated a laugh.

The creature stumbled onward, his weary limbs seeking comfort. His delicate ears had tended the name through proximity; had listened to it as it passed between lips of men dressed in robes, unfit to bear the plate of the man they mumbled for. They filled him with rage – marred his frail bones with discomfort, made his blood boil and blister his ghostly folds. He took to the night like a thief, pilfered names and addresses from the lips of the dying young – searched hungrily for his twinned limbs, for the half that had carved himself from his skin what felt like a thousand years prior.

Moonlit orbs fell upon the grace of an oaken door. He stumbles to it's frame – both fearful of his own inexplicable hunger as it blossomed from the winter that longed in the cage of his ribs, and overjoyed at his own inexplicable defeat, as it came to rest before the wooden frames. He was vulnerable there, vulnerable as he had not been since he was the tender age of eighteen; opted by the savagery of the wind in the winter, and the bounty of the harvest in the spring as it plundered from the snow. Curled fingers came to rest on the fringe, with a rap, rap, rap.

There was no answer.

Desperately, fingers clawed at the handle – obsidians pools cloaked in his own misery as he peered over his shoulder and into the depth of the streets, which sauntered in his peripheral like an untamed beast. Vita was no fool. Even though he had the brain of a genius and the quick hands of an assassin, he was weary with exhaustion, overcome with his own euphoric dimension, that he would be a quick slaughter in there fingertips. He pushed his forehead to the door then, as he relinquished himself to the younger boy that had danced among the snow, before he had pranced upon corpses and instead among flowers.

“Vaska.” He hissed into the grains of the door; obsidian orbs fluttering behind flushed eyelashes. The salt of her soil poisoned his jaw, draped along the crook of his arched neck and painted him a villain in the winter of the night.

“Vaska,” he called once more, a certain crack filtering into the hook of his vocals. “It's me, Vita. Vitaliy. Your brother. Your twin. Your half.”

He sprawled himself against the oak then, a picture of skin and wintered bones.

Afternoon

I do not dream of you anymore.

No longer do you inscribe your insignia upon my chest,
and suffocate me when I strive to breath.

You are no longer the violent vehemence of the sea,
but the fog as it dissipates between my fingertips.

No longer do I need poems,
to express how I feel.

You offered me words,
when there were none.

And I suppose I will always be thankful for that.

But you are no longer the ghoul beneath my fingernails,
or the ghost that lingers in the blinds in the morning.

I have found my own sunlight without you.

Gospel

He had never been in love. Had foolishly thought once that he had fallen in love with a girl who had troublesome eyes and a heart full of mischief, but he had been the tender age of eighteen, and when he had been shipped off to a relative war, she had forgotten him. She had watched the screens with a mild interest, a secret worry, but she had not expected him to win. She had pleasured herself with another man in the nights while he withered; and when he returned to his thinned mattress she had no interest in him. A changed man, is what she had defended herself with: excused herself from him for forever. He had sworn that he would never love again: that the burden of his withering heart was too much for any person to handle, let alone himself. He withered in his own sadness, drowned with the anchors he'd buried at the bottom of the sea, and wallowed in the bleakness and reality of his frostbitten story. Good things did not come to bad people: and so he waited, endlessly, for the day when there would be someone to make him whole. He first laid eyes on her when he was the tender age of twenty two; still impressionable and completely broken. She believed she could stitch him together, repair him and lift the world off his crooked shoulders.

'Do you love me?'

She would ask him on every occasion that his scarred features would be between her fingertips. There would be times when the answer was simple: times when he muttered an unalterable yes and pushed his lips to her own, led her to believe that he was forever endowed to her. But there were times when the answer struggled from his lips. She never blamed him. They would hide under cover of his rusted sheets, and she would ask, and he would remain absent. Not today. The inner demons swelled within him; made it impossible for him to feel anything other than regret, let the guilt bleed through his veins until he was worn dry. It was on these days that she pushed her lips to his face, softened him with the overwhelming loyalty of her love. She almost made him believe it. But he was nothing, if not a creature of habit, and the thought that somebody could make him whole again perturbed him. He was not worthy of such a pure love; and so he pushed her away, with restless fingers and marooned faces. She always returned, always came to his side: but no person can bare the thought that they are not enough, and so soon, she returned less and less, until she didn't return at all. He remembered the words that she had said in the rain once, tears streaking her golden cheeks, had them embedded in his heart:

'You don't always have to carry the weight of the world. It's alright to be happy.'

Prolific

Born with a crown carved into his chest, Thaddaeus Adonai Voltz had been egregiously born with the talent of perfection.

How arduous.

He forget the curse of his mother's Christian name by the time he had revolved eighteen thousand and twenty five times around a hysterical moon. She had perished by the blame of the Earth; had fallen victim to dirt and poison - and in all honesty, Daeus had never been quite sure how she had withered in her coffin. He'd always thought death was rather romantic until it singed his nostrils and burned his brain.

He had been genderless until he had graced air; but his birth had been nothing less of a miracle for two desperate adults.

( thaddaeus (aramaic) - matt. 10:3 - that praises or confesses. )

His knees were raw from wood: from spending hours upon hours bent on his bones with his fingers folded together, professing confessions to an ill-forgotten man who he'd pictured to sit on a throne of clouds. Daeus would never profess to his mother or father that he did not believe in such an entity: would mumble poems and prose under his breath and cross his lapel in the hope that he was convincing enough to be a blessed Christian.

It was when he was the tender age of seven that he peered between the crack of the library door. What he noticed was two bodies melded together - one that resembled his father and one of a woman. Daeus had been intrigued and confused; a pathway of veins as they protruded from flushed skin. He had been discovered, only moments later, when shoes clicked against the bitten wood: and he had been scolded with the cruelty of a belt and frostbitten words, confined to the promises of his room. It was then that he forgot God existed.

He becomes the example of his father: cruelty an addition to necessity as a fraudulent way to exponentially grow within yourself like a flower in the spring.

Born a incapable genius.

Taxi-Cab

I am not the dull sadness
of a cream colored room
at nine thirty on a friday night.

      A room identical to yours.

I am the crisp sway
of the evening fog,
as it blankets it's creations
with a remote kindness.

I am human,
and the poison that seeps
through my brain
is not my master.

It does not control me.

I am happy.

You

You are the chattering in my head.
            Stop. Stop. Stop.
You are my nerves in the morning,
or the waves,
as they flood my chest
while I stand barefoot in the kitchen.

You are what I wish to remember,
and what I wish to forget.

Strength

Sound mutes and captivates,
the forgotten parts of my weary soul:
renders me silent when I have considered myself defiant,
engulfs my broken limbs and
notches me to the concrete that describes my
grave.
The words that tip from the precipice of sanity and
hold together the frostbitten fingers of my courage.

Use of Force

His hands were anchors tied to the sea,
and his eyes were promises he could never keep.
His smile was the ocean as it consumed the shore,
and his heart was the landscape I'd been promised to explore.
His knees were the buckles looped around my hips,
and his whistle was the secret that never reached my lips.
His footprints were the memories I'd scrawled across my skin,
and his breath was my heartache as it sighed along my chin.

Before You Start Your Day

She puts her hand,
on the place where he left.
On the cavity that contained
her heart,
where he carved his name
on her like a possession.
And no matter how hard
she rubs,
or how hard she pulls,
she can't forget the words
he'd published on her chest
for everyone to see.

Being Human

Broken hipbones and twisted spines make your brain bleed a certain kind of crimson -- a fragility so centered in the apex of your thinking cavity that you almost forget that words can create noise when there is none and replace silence when it becomes so heavy you can't breathe. You've been force fed lies and phrases and given excuses for being who you are: which is human. You build walls of steel around your withering heart in the hopes that it will make you impervious to pain and make you a creature who can't be destroyed by hurtful words or nursery rhymes or flying fists. But no one ever told you that it's alright to have feelings -- that it's alright to feel pain as it bleeds through your fingertips and it's alright to feel that your brain has been stifled and your heart has been stolen.

It's alright to not be okay.

We seek imperfections in the grooves of our skin and create folds where there are none in the hopes that it will make us human. But you have forgotten that you are human. And that you are perfectly imperfect. Creation is what replenished us but nobody ever speaks of destruction -- of the decrepit buildings furrowing under weight they can't withstand, or humans tumbling under the cavities of normality and destroying themselves so that they can be rid of the distance they had created between themselves and humanity.

Destruction can be beautiful too.

Abolished factories and crumbling arcades are only an exemplification of human morality and for those of us that have reached the dingy corners of our frostbitten minds and dusted away the cobwebs, it can be normal. Sometimes we have to destroy: we have to clamber with violent fingers and tear apart the structures that had built us upward because they have made us whole and human -- and it's alright to be a segregated part of a puzzle, or the missing piece. Because one day someone will pick you up with tender fingers and slide you in your place and show you that the road to recovery is brutal and vehement, but also that it is kind. 

So it's alright to crawl to the recess of your mind and protect yourself from humanity: because humanity can be cruel. Humanity can be inhuman and immoral, and it can be aggressive, and it can crack your spine and leave you disabled. But it can be brilliant and wonderful -- and if you forget the good then you will be absorbed by the bad until you can't remember the light as it creeps through the blinds on a Sunday morning, or his breath on your skin to let you know that he is there and that he won't leave. 

You will forget the beauty of being human.

Blue

It was the color of his eyes in the morning. It was the color of the waves as they lapped the shore, and the color of the sky as they walked beneath it. It was the detail of his shirt as it settled against golden, bright and brilliant. It was the color of the storm as it thrashed against the windowpane as they found warmth beneath the coals. It was the color of his smile when he said "Goodbye, for now", and it was the color of the ocean as it mumbled beside the train. It was the color she felt flooding her chest, and the color that reminded her of him. It was the color of the bedsheets she'd betrayed him on, and the color of her guilt when she had said "yes". It was the color of her dress when she returned to his arms. And it was the color of his lips when he'd whispered, "But I loved you". It was the last color that reminded her of him. It was the color of his eyes when he'd murmured "goodbye".

Obscurity

She withered in his broad arms.

The creature had never been one to grieve over loss. He had lost so much in his life that it had sprung forth a torturous cycle; over and over and over again he watched the ones he held dear dissipate. With wisdom, he found that he could teach his bodice, his mentality, to adapt. And adapted he had. He'd adapted to walking the cluttered hallways of his small apartment alone, and he'd adapted to forgetting their faces where they lingered in his cranial membrane. But as he adapted to forget them, he had adapted to remember her. He cared for her precariously, watching as violent tears shredded the porcelain of her plump, rosy cheeks. He would whisper to her in the late night, soothing her back to slumber, and held her thick tendrils, completing circular movements methodically until it made him weary. He thought finally he could have something that would stay, something that would be his.

His howls pierced the evening air with a distinct clarity.

Aesthetic, white gloves gripped the golden areas of his flourished skin; whether to balance him, calm him, or attack him, he was unsure. As their tendrils drifted over the smooth of his skin, they left porcelain imprints that dissolved silently into his skin, absorbed much too easily. The ghosts lingered towards her, hovering hesitantly over her faded cranium, reluctant to interrupt the wolf as he sank toward the tiles.

One of them was brave enough to act, and the prying tendrils gently lifted the carcass from the ghoul's tendons. Away from that which she knew. He howled, a guttural sound manifesting from the crook of his hollowed chest, bursting mournfully from the thick of his throat and pushing through the slip of his parted, pink lips, piercing the air, crystallized in time. Air escaped him, and as the sobs racketed his lithe bodice, he found that he suffered through the desparity of his emotions. He released her, eventually, his reluctant tendrils unwrapping gingerly from her porcelain skin, pressing his gentle lips to the curve of her forehead, imagining that it was into slumber she dissipated, not death.

They left him to mourn, and mourn he did. He settled into a sprawled position on the iced tiles, tendrils curled to his chest. They pierced his ethereal skin, and what was once beautiful, was stained maroon. Veins, delicate patterns traced into his paling skin. Vehement tears streaked the rose of his flustered cheeks, and as he curled, his carcass shaking violently from the audible sobs, he dissipated. And as he lingered, he recognized himself less and less. It was at this point that he lost himself.

It was at this point that he lost his humanity.

War In My Mind

It engulfs as it dances,
innocent in origin.
It calls from forgotten window panes,
and rushes to join decrepit creeks.

It longs for a companion,
velveteen skin drenches hair and eyes
blurs vision until it is beautiful.

It finds solitude with wandering souls,
whispers coaxing poems into deaf ears
with the singular hope that it will be heard.

It will be forgotten.

Cannons

Traipses through the afternoon air,
fingers curved to the texture of bark.

Her silhouette begs him forward,
offers him shelter from the storm.

She pirouettes through flowers,
finding crevices in which to hide.

He knows her name like it's carved on his skin,
and he sings it like a lullaby.

But she ignores his plights.

And soon he finds himself
discarded among the waste of nature.

For once he finds no beauty there
and drowns in the chains

that concave his thinning ankles
and tether him to the reality

that she is not his.

One Love

He finds beauty,
in the curve of her smile,
and the scent of her breath.

She is lost,
without the he,
an emblem of his satisfaction.

But they are not beautiful.

Decrepit pieces,
of words sprung from branches,
that spiral from spines.

Love is as foreign,
as the words they mutter
from their mouths.

Two Weeks From Now

Two weeks from now:
skin draped in pink,
blushed from blood,
our heat levels rise.

Finding patterns,
in syllables muttered.

Words provide bandage,
for my wounds
that never seem to heal.

Tongue-tied:
we disengage,
only to divulge
our rights and wrongs.

It binds,
the me to you.

Bloodlines tie
the noose around my nape,
bruises in full bloom.

I've memorized the line,
from collar to collar.
The space between,
your neck and your shoulder.
And how my head
fit perfectly in place.

But you,
are the words on my tongue.
The thoughts behind my brain.
I wish I'd told you once,
kaleidoscope dreamers:
shipwrecked lungs,
buried under truth.

Two weeks from now:
lullaby's mused to deaf ears.
Time slips like ribbon,
between bruised fingers.

The Trees

We throw beer bottles at doors,
hoping that we can find a remedy for being human.

We inject ourselves with poisons,
longing that they can make us whole.

We label the broken parts of our anatomy,
with the thought that we can separate.

We spit words with vehemence,
knowing that they will destroy us.

We ruin and plunder,
in the name of progress.

We have forgotten what humanity is.

(forgotten the dew of the early morning grass,
or the scent of her breath as dawn creaks)

We consider ourselves whole,
but yet decorate ourselves as broken tapestry.

(adorned with the silence of our own mourning,
as we trap ourselves in words we can't escape)

The process of humanity,
is to abstain from progress.

Memoryhouse

You spill over the pages, flood with words so full that you forget to breathe. They come rapidly -- a tidal wave in your lungs, capsizing, bitter with hatred and remnant with remorse. You forget how it feels; the way fingers curl against the sand, the way the wind kisses your rose cheeks in a spring afternoon. You know only the lines: criss-crossed until each tile begins to look like the next. You know the curve of your pillow, the dip where your temple touches fabric, envelops your skin with the tenderness you've bitterly sought.

You forget the way skin feels on skin.

Perhaps you've memorized the silence between your fingers: the space where his should be. You've forgotten the pulse of your heart as it throbs in your neck, and now each beat struggles against the frostbitten cavity of your chest. You no longer welcome the invitation of comfort -- no longer greet it with amiable, open arms: instead push it away with bruised fingers as you fight a battle you want to lose.

But mostly, you've forgotten the brilliance of warmth.

You've discarded the somber whisper of the ocean on a perilous night, retraced the lines of weary picture frames in the hopes to rewind. You know only the weight as it presses against your chest. You no longer remember the butterflies in your stomach, or the wandering of curious fingertips against the grooves of oak. You've forgotten him, mostly. The silhouette of his cheek against yours, or the curve of pink against ivory as secrets are traded -- words traced through dances of fingertips, of smiles whispered against the press of lips (because body language has arranged itself as the centerfold of your art).

And it's brilliant because you haven't forgotten anything.

You remember everything so vividly it's like a scarlet nightmare -- a ghoul that appears in the blind hours of the night, enveloped in the silence you've kindled so dearly. 

But you wish to forget. 

And you think, perhaps, if you wish hard enough, you might forget the silent heartache of a bitter girl traced by her own misery. 

Epigram

Blood pumps endlessly throughout ivory veins.

Limbs move repetitively, avoiding the crisp wind of the afternoon day. The sun filtered behind forgotten hill tops; dancing idly behind the clouded veil. Cradles into the comfort of the wool; wraps the fabric around his emaciated carcass as to bite the wind backward. His efforts are simply in vain, as the wind nips his hollowed cheeks greedily.

The creature knows this place. Has memorized it's every detail; carved into the back of his macabre mind so that he may remember later. Knows brick after weary brick, has run his withered fingertips along their edges until they have leaked maroon, have punctured skin and flesh in the ambient attempt to retain him. Deadened optics trace lifelessly across cement padding, searching for source of entertainment and finding none. Limbs brush past other lifeforms -- cladded uniforms adorned with plates of respect. He has none. An ambiguous facade; marred with maroon puzzles, and decorated with blue and purple. He wears his bruises as his badge, as his prize, rather than his fault.

It stalks endlessly; meandering appendages carrying him far from the basement, from the classroom, from the comfort of sanctuary. It is perhaps what he does best -- ambiguity. Hollowed frame carries for what feels like miles: muscles weak with fatigue and indifference, circles formed under dead mirrors, and he dreams of a mattress beneath his feet. 

As he wanders, he finds himself in an unfamiliar territory: buildings formed with familiar architecture, but of a different atmosphere. Here, there is no cloud pressed to his chest. There is no daunting feeling of ill-satisfaction. Here, he finds his murmuring brain at ease. Clouded pools raise, absently, to peer at the creatures that shuffle before him: a fray of unknown sheep, bleating and blathering as they stumble aimlessly within each other. The creature does not move forward, does not engage their interaction. Instead, he stays apart. Bruised fingers dug into the fabric of his own skin, causing him to bleed maroon. He swayed, restless, at the edge; scattered pools dancing from bodice to bodice with no certain degree of interest.

I'm Sorry, I'm Lost

Driftwood, beached on shore. Cascaded by ribbons of sand. He has found solitude amongst the sea; broken into the softened, salty air. Feels it rushing through his lungs, ripping through his heart: bleeding through his intestines until he feels completely and utterly free. He has danced throughout time, completed the motions of a miserable life. Poisoned once by his desire for nothing, ribs shipwrecked as he plunged his orifices into powder, drowned his sorrows by the bottle. He was a work of art; a Sylvia Plath poem.

A stowaway. A wreck of a man, plagued by his own misfortune. Tired circles pierced under crystalline eyes, he wandered aimlessly from person to person, from cabin to cabin. A laugh pierces the air, but it is not his own. Shameless faces worn with regret; pupils widened with anticipation only to be twisted, broken until air is not his own. He has many faces, many words tumbling out of pierced grins; but he is one person. A name. Judas Villa. Boiling in the undertones of society, he is a name -- a story whispered through inquisitive kindness. Skill with a knife, with powder, with charisma. A morally deformed crook; broken from the sense of an ill-forgotten childhood. A plague upon the rest of civilization. A name.

Painful Memories

Fingers cross frivolously weak bones; spines on repeat and ribs twist like the arms of a decrepit tree. A box labeled fragile, he was never handled with care. Knocked around, passed between hungry fingers, until the contents were so battered and bruise they couldn't distinguish left from right and up from down. Half-hearted apologies are mumbled through weary lips, and his whole life he listens earnestly -- believes in their fragility, and hopes that they will mend. Break through the exterior he has built, instill within him the trust he so earnestly seeks.


Humbly committed to the prison they had built for him, there was no evidence of bail. Heartbeats rotting in frozen nights, wails muffled into frostbitten wind. Nervous fingers twitched with the anxiety of contact, a gift given from the women who had birthed him -- made him afraid of flying objects and pinched words. He pushed question marks at the ends of statements, hid behind shielded, ashen limbs, and wondered on the price of his sanity.

♛♛♛

His home became stale. Worn with pictures of martyrs; hanging from barely plastered walls. He grew restless, weary eyes dazzled with the destiny of greatness -- a picture painted into the foreground of his mind, present with his every bred action. He swung with the delicacy of a fawn blossoming into a stag -- anchors tethering him to the ground he had yet to wither within. They faded, with time. Ghosts murmuring on the wind as they swayed in and out of existence.

Wandered at a young age, crept within the dying streets and brawled in hidden corners with the fray. A mongrel. Street-rat. He knew nothing but the acid that crept through his veins -- poisoned his insides as well as his outsides; broken up fragments of dissected mind pieces bled through gardened veils. Couldn't find ways to translate feelings into words; bled his feelings into fists, and pounded, pounded, pounded until his vision was one of rainbows -- yellow, blue, purple, red. He couldn't understand the word stop. Muffled into the dictionary of words he barely knew, such as love, understanding. No incentive to learn, no incentive to live -- just a burnt flame quickly dissipating to ash.

Hide And Seek

Hesitant fingers reach sheepishly toward the exposed flesh.

Porcelain. Inquisitive pools dance selfishly across his bones; innocent in origin. She wants to consume him, sinfully, in a way that's so completely new that it stirs a frightened murmur in her intestines. Fingers search idly, navigating open flesh in the hope of port, curious and nervous. She runs a dry tongue over the peak of her pink lips, anxiety bubbling like a nervous tick in the apex of her throat. Every part of her flesh craves, longs from afar, under the sheets where they can't hurt her. Where words are no more than an idyllic lullaby murmured into deaf ears. Where pain is nothing more than something imagined by macabre minds.

Broken promises murmur behind her ears, whisper cruelties covered in charred flesh. His face is just another -- melted and shifted until he could be absolutely anyone. But he's not. He's not. Every inch of her screams, writhes within the prison she's locked herself in. He advances, a sign of his muffled impatience. And she wishes nothing more than to respond, to let roaming fingers wander, to let hidden shades disguise her hesitation. She wishes that there wasn't a lock within a heart: a wall constructed of stone, built with bruised fingers and broken bones that wanted nothing more than a safety that they had never been provided. 

White Lies.

It's in the silence that he hears words. Murmurs, whispers. Delicate promises spoken earnestly under the kitchen glare. 

"Genius," he manages to mumble between paralyzed lips.

They watch him tediously. Dark pupils secluded to evacuated corners, shrouded in a familiar film. He wishes to touch them; to extend a forearm and brush his fingertips of their corpses, return the welcome they had so graciously given him. But he would not. More accurately, could not. It was perhaps because his wrist was not connected to his hands, and instead the white models hung lifeless at the end of each arm. Paralyzed, like his lips, with a morbidly buried fear.

Time slips like a ribbon through his conscious. Recluse eyes observe that the time is exactly eight oh three. He peers only a moment later, and the numbers have morphed, and it now reads twelve fourteen. He wonders, remotely, if he has moved within these four hours, or if every muscle within his skin has ceased to work. His physique in denial, rebelling against the tenacity of his vivacious thought pattern.

"Come," they beg.

He obeys.

He slinks purposefully across the wooden floor, scraping bruised knees and cut elbows. Brown eyes dance tirelessly from the repetitive detail of the floor to the caricatures of his reanimated hands. It's at this moment that he notices their color.

Maroon.

A sound gurgles from the precipice of his cracked lips. It resembles a scream.

Coming Home.

Fingers folded gently over the precipice of the grayed paper. He had memorized the lines; committed them to memory, in fear that he would lose his only tether to her. The man imagined the silhouette of her face, the remnants discarded from his wistful dreams. He had seen so many faces, a multitude of different shades; all a replica of the original. The original was the one he loved, the one he wanted. The one that danced like ash throughout his memories, sliding through his fingertips whenever he grasped for her velvet skin.

He moved like a shadow. Each step longer than the next, each one more desperate. Cigar, usually stored within the clenches of his ivory teeth, was positioned safely in his pocket -- forgotten, for now. He pawed restlessly, boots clicking unevenly against the rough stones as they compacted under his touch, shaded optics searching nervously for familiarity. He was lost for only a moment (perhaps an hour, a day, a month), when suddenly he found her, and she found him.

He sought her, anxiety remedied by her presence. The previous perilousness that had boiled within his stomach, twisting and turning and churning him into a seemingly bottomless pitt (or the recesses of his mind, wondering where she could be, hidden underneath the makeup and her own obscurity) had faded into a murmured moan. Tumbled toward her, broken and desperate, the shade of a man empowered by his own desperate passion. He loved her, loved her, loved her; and perhaps if he murmured it enough, she would too.

Ivoried tendrils wandered from his bruised, battered sides to the curves of her arched, golden cheeks. He grasped them; rough enough that it would be enough to shake her into the present (to remind her that he was real  and they were not), but soft enough so that his touch would not spring purple flowers from her casket. Archetype brought his forehead to her own, perilously close. So close, in fact, that his breath was hot against her own, causing waves of guttural longing to 
shiver through his aching bones.

"You've been gone so long," the man murmured through lucid lips, dreary portals brought downward to avoid her own. It was, perhaps, that he didn't want to ruin the moment, retch it off it's insidious plans. Parted lips brushed over tender skin with a passionate remorse; filled with instead of lust,love, generic and pure in origin. It was finally that his arduous, worn portals brought to her own, and the emptiness returned. How long would he have her for now? A week? A day? An hour? The rarity of the situation was, that she was not his, but he was her's indefinitely.

Like we're going to war.

She was beautiful.

Her porcelain skin was fair, and the only remedy of color remained on the tilt of her rounded cheeks. Barely born into the world, she wept with misunderstanding. Violent tears grazed the stretch of her facade, pitiful sobs racketing from the hollow of her withering chest. She nestled perfectly into the crook of his slim arms, her enlarged cranium sitting dutifully in the space collapsed within his elbow, her button nose pressed into his bicep. He held her gingerly, his lithe tendrils lightly grasping her sides in a sudden fear that his touch would somehow harm her. It was ridiculous he knew, but the worry had been imprinted within his thinking pattern, marring him mentally.

Moments prior he had been howling, overcome with the desperate grief of a young man succumbed to violent turbulence. His decrepit, emerald optics had watched as the ivory bird willowed in her sheets. Lost in a flurry of red, drowned in a pit of screams, he had not been by her side when the life force had evaporated from her hopeless carcass. Her chocolate optics, once flooded with such innocent vibrance that none other could match, were drained. Her porcelain skin darkened, and her mind plunged to a place where he could not follow. It was perhaps what scared him the most, pitched his hollowed howls into mournful moans.

Only the creature that emerged from her tethered him back to existence.

He cradled it with more warmth, with a sudden vigor instilled by the loss of a life. He was surrounded by white, the stinging pulse of antiseptic flooding his nostrils until it singed him. They grabbed, tendrils dashing towards him, reaching for the child sheltered within his grip, and he pulled away from them violently, emerald eyes widened with fear. He stumbles backward, losing footing, and he crashes into various, metal tools. He regains himself though, with a panic for the life, and steadies himself uneasily. The fingers have ceased. Instead, guarded optics gaze at him wearily, tired with battle and fatigue. They speak, monotonous tones voweled across the thin space, and he listens reluctantly.

She is dying. The life is dying.

He howls mercifully as they tear her from his tendrils.

Time's End.

Aleksandar Daskalov had never been one to promote suffering through relentless pain.

Of course, he had never held that opinion when it pertained to himself. Only when his small, ripe tendrils were wrapped around the thick, corse neck of the hound that struggled uneasily in his surprisingly strong grip. It wasn't that he had a particular, inbred hate for the mutt; though there were a few certain times where he had wished to disregard it's seemingly futile existence. It was because the hound, after relentless years of padding uneasily on aged paws, had come to the spiraling end of it's weary life. There was no bright tunnel ahead, no sign that pushed him onward. 

The dog was useless. 

And useless things were just that, useless.

It squawked and resisted under the boy's grip, but old age could not overcome the fingers that circumvented it's neck. In it's last few moments, it gazed wearily at one of it's former owners, darkened irises softening as each breath strangled from between it's lips. There was not a bone in the twelve year old boy's body that asked him to stop, no remote part of his cranium reasoning that cruelty was worse than faux loyalty. Some part of him that whispered that the hound had some sort of buried reason to live, to continue breathing air. There was no functional humanity that disrupted the glaze of his shadowed pupils as they rested on the face of the animal. There was a slight hitch, a last breath struggled, pushed through the thick of his neck and into his core, before the light faded from his optics. Where his muscles were once tense, rigid with the fight for life, they weakened, limp in the young boy's arms. 

The creature was dead.

It took moments for the boy's tendrils to relax, to detach from the creature's neck. Blinded pupils lit up, if only for a moment - like a sudden realization. But the feeling never sank, never rested in the pit of his stomach, and as quick as his humanity had appeared, it vaporized. The body of the former hound sunk into the dirt, his own ivory canvas blending with that of the rusted earth, and still the child didn't move. He watched the carcass apprehensively, waiting for a side to lift, or a moan to erupt from it's sewn lips; but no such moment occurred.

Minutes melded into hours. And what seemed to be days later (but in actuality was only a matter of seconds), a figure appeared in the breadth of the stone doorway. The boy didn't look up. The silhouette moved in a distinctly feminine fashion, it's slanted shoulders set upward with worry, the curves of it's face dampened with anxiety. Palms came to rest on his relaxed shoulder, circles traced lightly over the square of his shoulder blades. Hushed words were soothed into his ears. But she didn't understand, couldn't. It wasn't a mothers job to predict that her child was inhuman. 

A model on the outside, a monster inside. 

She hustled him into the house, her touch gentle, her words kind. He followed her, obediently. Not because he truly was upset, because he found there was no other option. They buried the dog in a hollow ditch later that day, and where he was supposed to cry, he didn't. He watched as the creature was enveloped in the dirt, and he couldn't help but affirm that he had done it a favor.

He had given it a purpose.