Rose's Poetic Prose

I'm going to post all my poetic prose here because this thread is annoyingly void of content.
So yeah.

The Astraeus

Sing, o muse Erato, of the sun and of the moon, of rubies and pearls, of oceans and islands and beating hearts. Swear to me your truth and I will swear to you my eternal servitude.

The first time I saw you was the first time I saw the moon in a foreign sky and that was the day I resolved to love you. But I myself had little choice in that matter, as the solar system will do what it chooses despite our own wishes.
The sun is older than the moon, my love, though it may seem otherwise on the surface (as craters mark time so much better than rays). And the sun watches the moon as he waxes and wanes and shines in perfection from afar. He’s so lovely. Even from a distance, she knows that.
And when the time comes for an eclipse, it ensues and we pass through the coast with sleeping eyes that wish to capture all, but angles and lighting and weary hearts stand in the way until the journey has ended. We slash our wrists on the ancient marble of the palace by the sea. Say nothing, or the offering won’t be enough to please the god who has enslaved us heartbroken fools who unknowingly tethered ourselves to the crystal shoreline. Our sacrifice spills red down the ancient stone as it has for thousands of years under a sky that is neither day nor night but stars and islands and the tossing of tides… This is what we collapse into for a fleeting glance or an entire millennium.
If the ocean is sapphire and the sky is topaz and all the houses clinging to the cliffs pearl, would the beating in our hearts be ruby? Pure enough to quell storms or make them pound harder? I feel storms in my breast more sharply than rubies. And the god feels it too atop his marine acropolis.
So we are dragged away, kicking and screaming, though our efforts are useless against the power of oceanic divinity when we should have found doves—but we were tied much too tightly to the waves.
I can see photographs of the moon from my landlocked red-brick prison and you can see them of the sun from yours. But photographs are not equivalent to our blood on the steps of Poseidon’s Temple when we needed Aphrodite but could not bear to step away from the perfect waters of the Aegean Sea and the sun keeps rising and setting in colors so much less beautiful than that day—but the moon will always stay lovely.

Muses and Martyrs

“Why do people smoke? It’s bad for you and no one should do it.” You kick a cigarette butt away from the harsh pavement on which you stand. Distant, timeless. I pretend you’re not.
Wars—gotten so out of hand they must be waged with guns and knives, spiraling from discontent to furry and greed. But why I keep losing battles fought with light, poetry, and arrows has nothing to do with that matter.
I look away from your bright form to the night sky, hoping to see the moon hanging low and full like it does when werewolves break the weak flesh of innocent maidens—martyrdom for the cause of dark fantasy. I am not a martyr but a prisoner in a war you don’t know you’re fighting. Not a martyr yet.
“People are dumb, what do you expect?”
“More ashtrays.”
As I roll my eyes and let out a chuckle, my mortal wound becomes just a little deeper. If you hadn’t been so concerned with brightening things that will not brighten—alleyways behind theaters, for example—you’d keep track of your arrows like you keep track of lyres and pay attention to those that will not become as impenetrable as the laurel tree.
I’m bleeding harder now and you don’t know—crafty, subconscious plans you strategized the hell out of. “Distance is absurd,” I scoff. Believing no one can see you won’t make you invisible.
“Distance is just velocity multiplied by time.”
“Is that science or math?” You fight in ways I can’t understand.
“I have no idea what I’m talking about,” you laugh, brightening places that will never accept light. You’ve abandoned showing mercy on me (as I now am an easy kill, a fawn with a broken leg as you are a wolf). Like I abandoned plans for hiding out and then reasoning with you, like you said you would before distance became relevant at all.
“Time is ridiculous too.”
“That’s equal to distance divided by velocity.”
I roll my eyes, executing my most frequent small protest to torture, “It’s irrelevant.”
“Sometimes it’s relevant. Like when people say to live in the present, and that makes sense, except the present is such a short amount of time if you think about it. Therefore, instead of living in the present, one should live in the moment.”
Now it is my turn to laugh. I know I say it like a joke, but really I’ve begun to burn like the remnants of that cigarette you kicked away once did. Not like how you burn, not at all proudly with a whispered secret truth told in lyric like a poem. I burn like wildfire… “What does it matter if I don’t live in every single moment? What does it matter if I’m fifteen-hundred miles away or right here?” These words don’t escape my lips, but I think, “You will keep shooting me, wounding me, killing me until there is nothing left to shoot or wound or kill.”
“I can still see you, for starters.”
I sigh, “I don’t believe you.”
“Why would you not believe me? You’re not invisible.”
I think about all the reasons that is true (you’ve found me as I tried to stay hidden and shot me with absentminded arrows until I am ready to give up completely. But you pretended to be hidden yourself) and all the reasons it is false (you fret over lyres and laurel trees while I wait patiently, being murdered ruthlessly while you sit there aloofly speaking prophecies and healing those who come to you, but never healing me). And I make my judgment of word choice, “Because you’re too caught up in distance and time to care about anything else.”
“Is that a bad thing though? Living in the moment makes you appreciate everything around you in that span of time.”
So close to death, I can feel its cold fingers, I murmur the feeble words, “And how are you appreciating this moment?”
Time and distance become just as irrelevant as I believe they are but as precious as you believe because I’m more than a thousand miles away but nothing matters but how bright and healing you are as you say with your torturous voice, “I think this is a pretty sweet moment.”
There’s a pause.
And if it is a battle—
You
Give me a victory
With the words—
So simple—
“Lovely, actually.”

Of Storms, Spirits, Rose Petals

I think I feel you, but I really feel the wind.

Ghosts of you in my childhood nightmares push up against my skin, breathing softly like the breeze. This dark fantasy is not a nightmare now that the air currents have pulled us and pushed us together or apart, but a lucid dream. You are a ghost, a figment of imagination pieced together with glue ground from the hooves of horses we ran away on. Spirits do not speak words in tongues I can understand, so you press pictures into my flesh with fingers composed of shockingly warm air. But I want to know the words of your haunting existence.
Enchanted by the light you emit yet torn apart by the wind, I find the qualities of ghostliness more appealing than flesh if I am physical and you are an apparition in the dark of night, creating a faux day. Though they say life is a fine line, I cannot cross it to join you because pictures on my skin cannot communicate desire like spoken word and as a phantom, time becomes altered. I don’t know how to understand you.
You come when you please, painting self-portraits using air and flesh. And I am helpless, helpless, helpless to bend the wind in more flattering ways to us both. With each fading touch, I blow away more in the wind until there is nothing left but my core—beating, pounding senselessly. Nothing left for you to imprint images on. So I try one, final time to grasp an apparition’s warm, soft fingers composed of molecules I wish I had more time and courage to decipher. Heart—nothing else—a last message across the line.
Love.

I think I feel you, but I really feel the wind.

Purgatory

Moaning. Screeching. Crying. “Where is he…?”
Dry, desolate, desert—but alliteration does not roll well off your parched tongue that hits chapped lips as they drag across the barren, cracked ground, searching for pure water.
Peter 5:8—addiction. Addicts of rain and night and neither you’ve known carnally or ethereally for an eternity. Nothing but sand under your fingernails as you scratch at scabs, tearing off what once could heal. Infection. There is something boiling beneath your skin that must get out—china white, ice, snow, two hydrogen and an oxygen. We’re all addicted to something, aren’t we darling?
Twitch, shake, scream, see storm clouds on the horizon and know they won’t reach you. So you pick harder at the thousands of scabs and let your eyes roll back into your head in make-believe ecstasy. Sweating from the sun that hasn’t left the sky in weeks, sweating from the lunacy budding in your mind, sweating from the lack of water and the burns all over your naked skin. Or is it clothed? It might as well be naked, for each inch is covered in scabs and sand and burns and the inevitable emptiness of sobriety that can only be found in a desert purgatory.
Purgatory. This is purgatory. Permanent purgatory—or so it looks now—for sins you didn’t recognize in the moment.
Scratch harder, dig deeper. Lure the rain to fall from your dripping blood, the night to mirror the building pool. Look at the mess you’ve created because he has abandoned you—naked in this desert where the sun never stops turning your white skin red, never does the sand and dirt leave the bed of your nails and the raw flesh of your wounds, scabs torn off to prevent healing, for if they mend there will be nothing left to feel, and if there is nothing left to feel, purgatory becomes limbo and he becomes obsolete, everything obsolete until insanity must be ended by over-the-counter lobotomy.
Will you drink the poisoned water to end the thirst, only to fall even deeper into your eternal punishment? Or will you continue to hope that the pool of your blood will turn into water and the clouds miles away will come over head and the moon will rise and love you as if you were the sun and the stars will marvel at your beauty as if you were a phoenix and the rain will wash all your sins away as if they were never there to begin with?
He never will.
Your symptoms are worsening and the line between poisoned and pure, addicted and clean is blurring like the blue sky above and the tan ground below. Poison or pretend…
If night were to come, you’d wish on the first star for the cracks in the sand to be filled with water, the cracks in your lips to be filled with him…

A Thank You Note to the Bluebirds

For as long as my lungs have granted me with air, I have granted my fingers with the nimble work of weaving strings of colors into patterns and from patterns into stories and from stories into ribbons. I tied them to my heart for safe-keeping—the flowing, the stout, the ugly, the beautiful—all the same. They hung from my breast and swayed in the morning wind as I weaved more beneath a willow tree and pretended the idle task had meaning.
Enchantment—all the ribbons assured me this was enchantment—as I peaked around the branches of my home and for the first time watched as you weaved your ribbons too. You, in the middle of the meadow, created more beauty than I had ever known before. I saw this from afar and knew better than to call this enchantment. I knew to call it love.
For days you sat beneath the sun as I shrouded my body in shade. I had never felt so timid, never created such half-hearted garlands before as I did while you made beautiful ones. I wanted to know your ribbons—I needed to know your ribbons.
As the breeze rustled the leaves of my willow tree and the ribbons of my heart, I walked into the meadow, under the sun, near you. And with your lovely smile, you came close, and picked the longest, plainest strand that hung from me, and tied it to your heart as well so when the wind came and rustled the others, that one stayed steady. From that moment on, our fingers could not move quickly enough to attach the streamers to each other as the sun set and the moon rose and it was time for me to go back to the willow tree and you to the banks of the river you call home.
Though it aches to move apart, as the distance stretches the ribbons and pulls on our hearts, we do not give up. They do not tear, for the beauty that connects us is strong and the knots in our hearts stronger still. We weave more each day and wrap the end that has not been secured to our organs around the feet of bluebirds. With a soft kiss on the birds sweet little heads for good luck, we send them into the sky, soaring over meadows and fields and rivers, until they reach the other and are tied tightly to the chest. I lie to myself and say I am satisfied that the bluebirds carry your touch farther than I ever have.
Days bleed into weeks and weeks into months and I have grown lonely and desperate and my heart cannot bear the sight of another bluebird perched in my willow tree. My lungs do not grant me air for a moment in anticipation. I slip my heart out of my breast, the ribbons still attached with perfect little knots and lovely tiny bows. Treating the aching, beating thing as I do colors that do not match well in my works, I place it in the core of the willow tree for safe keeping. A leap of faith. I take my first step onto the tapestry of ribbon we have created. Shimmering of gold and silver, violets and scarlet red, of every color I have ever known. The loveliest tapestry of all. I walk the thousands of miles between us in the bright sun and never dare to look back. But I do not find you on the banks of your river, for you buried your heart deep beneath its bed to ensure its protection. I find you in the middle of the tapestry we weaved together, out of colors into patterns into stories into ribbons. I find you here.
And together we create our colors, our patterns, our stories—our ribbons—and tie them to our new hearts, made from willow seed and river water and raw purity of the truth that the ribbons could not deny us—this enchantment you laid over me is love. And whether we have been bound to the willow trees or river banks, the foundation is stronger for the strain and I love you more than you could ever know.

The Library

Eyes wander and fleeting fingers, they run down spines that are too weak to protest. Our spines of leather, stitched to the pages within. But I remember when my spine was made of bone and blood—things she wished we forgot. Volumes of life and love and all with the same inevitable end of beautiful birds being captured and caged by a woman who wears the skeleton key keeping us here around her wrinkled neck, taunting us with our senseless existence. Motionless existence, we feel the callused fingers of a thousand men who live for nothing but to touch our lovely spines, but never venture to dig their nails under us and crack the first page. They caress meaninglessly and look without seeing and she smiles as if she enjoys the misery of hopeful hopelessness that infects us lonely works of truth as we sit for an eternity on the endless shelves, being touched by those we wish would walk with their hands in their pockets.
So when the skeleton key closes the door and the sun sinks below the horizon, a solemn relief hangs in the stagnant air and for a moment, just a moment, there is something like peace. Until the shadows begin to dance across the shelves and our hearts of paper and ink begin to race and you emerge from behind the curtains. I have never seen such a caring smile or loving touch. Fingers whose true softness I can only imagine take each volume of the shelf and beautiful eyes –more beautiful than anything I have ever seen—read over each first page with a look of pure ecstasy. The moon makes his way across the ebony sky and the candle beside you burns lower and you are so close I can feel the warmth of your hands, the thirst of your eyes, the longing of your mind. And when the pads of your fingers brush against the leather of my skin, light breaks through the windowpanes, the tumblers all align and you slip away into the shadows before I ever truly knew you.
I have never felt more trapped. Bound by ink and parchment to a prison with bars composed of leather. Never more passionately have I hated she who wears the skeleton key over her dead heart. And I know I must get out.
I thank the stars that have now emerged into the sky that your touch has not been spoiled on me by another when you appear once again. Your caress is so gentle and kind as you pull me from the shelf and open my pages and if I had a heart made of flesh and blood instead of paper and ink, it would be pounding harder than I have ever known. But you do not stop after the first page as you have done with all the others. The moon makes his way across the ebony sky and the candle beside you burns lower and you linger on the words that lie within me. So engrossed, you do not notice the sun or the skeleton key and if I had a heart, it would stop. Frantic. You grab me from the table and as you go, you knock down that candle beside you and the flames begin to leap and run as fast as you do, racing against the rage of a woman who enviously turns pretty girls to books and a fire that cares for no one. She roars and screeches and moans and you break through the glass windowpane in a panic.
But the gravity that surrounds me multiplies and the pages crumple and break and I am bursting through the stitches in my leather. My spine of skin and bone. My heart of flesh and blood and love and freedom.