There is love in your body but you can't hold it in,
It pours from your eyes and spills from your skin,
Tenderest touch leaves the darkest of marks,
And the kindest of kisses break the hardest of hearts



I was a heavy heart to carry, my feet dragged across the ground. And he took me to the river, where he slowly let me drown. Sacrifice was an art of demise, drawn warm, tender and compassionate one moment, chilling and damned when death poured over its veins. It fluttered, bird-like and soft upon taffeta canvas, silken strings of harmonic chords wrapped, ensnared upon the brink of corruption, soaring, lofting, gazing at the heavens, until it plunged, scarring and searing. An aria, ethereal and intangible, embraced by the caressing tones of divinity, then lost to the torrid waves of acrimony and villainy. Captured, locked, chained and encased into the armaments of another time, licentious harps dooming it to a arcane requiem, lamenting, the ghostly, haunting keen of destruction. Seraphic fingers could trace the once vibrant hum of spring and folly, but would not be able to muster the healing, assuaging calm that had rendered it tranquil, an artifact never whole. Discarded amongst the rubble, piece by piece shattered and splintered, thrown by tides of wind, sand and water, flown to the rising cliffs and the disheveled hills, forgotten in the worn valleys of time, distance and space. Little lamb left at the altar, bleeding, drained, extinguished. Again and again, fostering hope, desire, ambition, while wrecking its own yearning, longing, reverberant renditions of cataclysmic opuses. Perhaps that was the most heartbreaking portion of its ancient elegy; that no matter how many times it was presented, it was neglected and disregarded in the frail snippets of bone and soil it’d danced for, never to be seen again, condemned, consigned, to oblivion. The tragic pulse that scarcely echoed, the harrowing plummet that merely whispered before its consignment of death and salvation, calling to the shades of darkness for more light. All the world a stage, and no one to see its final performance.

I was a heavy heart to carry, my beloved was weighed down. My arms around his neck, my fingers laced to crown. She’d lost a part of herself that day, amongst the wails and barbs of war, along the steady beat of savage, ferocious bindings, across the walls of parlors of her devastated, debauched, home. The folly, the whimsy, the wondrous serenity of her ardent youth had been torn from her soul, from her heart, from her mind, fanciful interludes of compassionate smiles, beneficent grins, lavish, bountiful cordiality ripped, clawed, from her flesh. Playful waltzes, laughing waltzes, devious, Cheshire impulses, seized and ceased. Her siege of warmth, fairy dust, nymph frivolities, angelic audacity, were gone, no longer enameled to the miseries of her scorched world, her ruthless beginnings, her disastrous existence. Convictions warped, discarded for a more sullied aspiration, bent and broken, intertwined with the atrocious, heinous turmoil aloft upon her shoulders, until the weight was too much, and she abandoned the glowing traces of radiance, fettered, struggling reverie. She’d chosen to arm herself against the cruel junctures by becoming a predacious, nefarious beast, and all it had given her in return was the luster of loss, sweeping over her eyes, scraping along her heart, embroiled and sequestered within her chest until it became naught more than a rancorous, bitter ache. Lena, once dulcet satin, melodic lace, bright, ardent; had been twisted, distorted, spoiled and snared by the morose indulgences of crusades, campaigns and brutality. Sin coiled in her blood, iniquity speared in her lungs, and immorality spiked in her lithe conjectures. Her enigmatic caresses, elegant, unearthly, exquisite, were buried in the warped finality of ruin. She lived a lie, poured disgrace into her limbs, as monstrous and odious as her lineage, blossoms and petals plucked from their otherworldly grandeur, varnished to the unholy filaments garnered in her immolation. Where prior she’d been too strong to fall victim to the licentious boughs, she now kept company with them, the wicked and the atrocious, just as foul as the transgressions themselves – and all of it, for nothing.

My love has concrete feet, my love’s an iron ball, wrapped around your ankles over the waterfall. Lena curled among the ashes of her former self, felt the croon of the chilling ground spider, quick and fragile, over her limbs. Not a sylph, not an angel, but a sienna coat of debacles and surrender; rabbit hearted girl, frozen in offering. Hidden amongst the lacework of glaciers and caverns, she allowed herself to weaken, to cave into the despair, the melancholy of her shambled, destroyed shards. For what strength is necessary now, when a soul has already given into temptation? Incapable, deficient, worthless, chords of a demonic past haunted and loomed, words that could hark, portend, the travesty and tragedy of her noble cause, that could devastate and obliterate, and for the moment, they had. Like a weed, she’d immersed herself in the sun and believed that she wouldn’t fall apart in the careful, intricate carvings of her optimism and valiant pathways. Now, her roots withered, dimmed, shaken by the dissolution of her nation, of her own resolve. She pressed her head against the cool trappings of the icy wall, felt the glacial interlude hush her thoughts, catching a muffled gasp before it turned into a sob. Her eyes, empty, vast, hollow, looked beyond the arch, saw the turbulent wounds festering amongst her brethren, sanctuary abolished, misgivings brimming. She couldn’t bring herself to join them, to growl, spit and assail what life had given them, not while she was mourning her own defeat, her own cowardice, her own disturbing slip into corruption. She was not formidable enough for them, for the strong, simmering potency of their vengeance, for the noble crusade building amongst their hearts. Not when she’d proffered perseverance, and found it was left wanting. She turned her face into the arch of stone then, pressing her sword into the frigid wall, tried to become a piece of its architecture, solid and still. All she allowed herself was the growing uncertainty of what awaited her, what she would become: a shambled collection of melodies, morality and anarchy, never quite good enough for anyone, anything.