This was not a poet’s whimsical prose, but a laureate’s disastrous symphony; serenity severed, reverie ruptured. Wavering on caustic lyrics: acidic, rancorous and bitter, a brutal, restless, and unwavering tempest had risen from a fiery din, a crackling fire ignited and instigated from kindness, from benevolence, ripping, searing, dousing until all that was left of her existence was the daunting periphery of a world she’d thought she’d escaped. The stag had changed, altered, from magnificent majesty to distorted duplicity, drawn up a mask he’d kept hidden so that as she stared upon him all she caught were glimpses of the past, snippets of sin. He was her father, buried in rubble and decay, dangerous and unpredictable, brutal and bellowing, tearing flesh from bone, pride from brawn, screaming, clawing, and destroying. He was her mother, asp, viper and cobra, snaking and coiling until she’d molded the sinuous smirk upon her lips, breathed croons and promises she had no intention of keeping, designed the manic bolero of heinous, merciless, monstrous upheaval along her venomous tongue. He was her brethren, depraved, malicious and heathen, reaching for the sky and everything else around it, ensnaring stars until their lights extinguished, diminished, withered and died, monsters armed for the slaughter. He was her childhood, damned, doomed and desolate from its genesis, the cloistered, the forlorn, the wretched, plucking croon of silence. He was transformed, and so she followed suit, beckoned the closed walls of her secured composure, begged, pleaded and implored for her soul to not be crushed under the weight of his words. She felt like the lonely youth again, away and awake to the rhythm of war drums, to the atrocious, villainous creeds that spilled over her ears, to the broken hymns that graced her lips like fervent, arduous prayers. There were no wishes, hopes or dreams now, no aspirations that hummed just beneath her heart to keep her alive, to keep her alive, only the mechanical beating of her soul, the ethereal essence that managed to encompass the enduring fortitude and resilience she’d built upon her graceful entity. Was this what her compassion wrought – fury, ire, and outrage? Had her words, so invoked, so influenced, by the muse of warmth, strength and tenderness, been twisted into a maelstrom of atrocity? Had she unraveled some chords of entropy, left them to simmer and boil over into this brewed malice and menace?

Her smile disappeared. Instead of angelic, seraphic glee, instead of the sacrificial, martyred offering of her beneficence, her features, her countenance, became void of emotion and reached for survival, for salvation from the grim talons snaking into her flesh. Lips, void of emotion, strung together like a taut string, eyes, radiant, honeyed glimmers of faith and trust, morphed into the strangled posture of an already ruined saint. The soft amber turned hardened stone, the sienna glow of her rapture solidified into archaic mettle, grit and valor, the posture of her dominion over the unruly, the decayed, the transformed. Without its supremacy, without its authority, control and power, she would have cracked into a million pieces, been found on the rime and ice years later glazed over into little shards of glass and lullabies. She raised her eyes to meet his, allowed the piercing, puncturing constraint to wash over her body, bestowed calm in the audacious clamor, in the thickening, suffocating hostility. For a moment, Lena waited for suffocation under its brandished weight, to be folded up like a ragdoll and tossed across the edge of the earth, left broken, discarded and cold again. In the meticulous, grinding alteration, of preparation and secrets, of furtive, specious slights, of a sword brandished towards her body, she reached for the inner puissance she’d so carefully wielded, felt the scrape, the grate, the pull of her tranquil invocations envelop her being. In the distance, for nothing existed other than the snake and the nymph, no longer dancing on laurels or peaks, Imogen growled, echoed and bristled her vexation, threatened with boldness and instinct. Her companion’s resolution, courage and daring fed her inclinations, her words brewing behind her mouth, the steel and determination to bear the haunting, looming reminders that she could never elude the pieces of her past, or the monstrous contortions of an intangible ache.

So, the syllables flowed, a composition of truth formed by years of abandonment, of demons hiding in her own blood, of salvations peeking through cracks and chinks in armor. “I know my flaws.” She breathed, ever brazen in front of potential scars, of feverish ruin, of the lingering potential behind a wounded stallion’s eyes. “You avoid yours.” She looked nowhere else but into his once luminous features, attempted to rediscover the hidden nuances of majesty that flowed from his radiance and echoed in his movement, in his motion, and if they were cutting, sharp stares, she made her vocals the same, biting tones. Dipped in passion, in candor and veracity, she strung them with no niceties, no ambrosial, cordial speeches, and let the truth slink over rigid bones. “Only the weak think themselves strong enough to not seek guidance.” Are you so far gone?