30 Days Of Writing: Day 7

~

'Vessel'

In the night of the cinema, you

poured yourself down my throat

like electricity, coursing through

my arms and wrapping yourself

around my shoulders like an

unwelcome lover; infiltrating,

penetrating, swelling my veins

and stilling my tongue except

for when it speaks of you.

Perfection in the angle of

your jaw line. Perfection

in the curve of your cheekbone.

Perfection, sharp and blinding,

in the length of your long fingers.

You crackle like sex and magic;

you rape me with the force of your

invisible scent. You are statuesque

and impenetrable, six feet tall on

the screen and six inches long as a

jagged shard in my aorta, creeping

ever closer to that vital chamber

where you will finally tear my

left ventricle and stop my blood,

my breath, with lust. You will

fill me till I can be filled no longer,

because you live by alien rules that

enable you to transcend time and

space so you can crawl between my

legs when I’m alone and suck me dry,

make me cry, make me hate you, make

me love you, make me your hollowed

vase filled with withered blooms that

vaguely resemble what I used to be.

I rue the day I knelt willingly at the

altar along with the millions to worship

your ruthless beauty and two-edged gifts

that you scatter for us to scramble over

like crazed maenads. I am mindless with

a hunger that can only be fed by your

silver tongue. Deceiver, weaver of

wayward thoughts, fill me again with

your knife-like eyes; pour out my mind

and fill it with your smooth limbs and

impregnate me until I disintegrate and

my bones melt into yours and serve to

make you ever stronger.

~

30 Days Of Writing: Day 6

'Fount'

~

 

We are the hungry ones. Alabaster skin and full of teeth. We feed on the hollow chests of young not-yet-men; on the breasts of new mothers and old crones; on the squalling red flesh of month-old infants. We feed on those with love to give. Love enough to fill us and blunt the gnashing of our inner maws. Love. What we cannot give, we need to live.

We are the last of our kind. We are the ancient gods kept alive by fading faith. And in place of lost faith, we are driven to seek that which you give so generously.

Love. Such a soft, whispery word; yet so broad in its promise, falling so easily from human lips. Want, need, lust, longing, greed, childish craving – all these and more are confused with love. Love in its distilled form, as a singular emotion, is given by very few. Those who claim to own it do not. Those who pour it out freely do not own it.

Or perhaps, all roads lead to love. The fount of all sentiment – including hate. The fount that we as gods must now drink from. Once, humans sought from us an elusive elixir. Now we drink theirs from their backyards, their streets and beds; in the dead of night, in the daylight, in the tender place between their collarbones. We drink and drink. But our appetites are as immortal as we. And so it goes on: the sucking, the dark, the great empty. Gnashing fangs in our bellies. Hunger in our eyes.

Faith, once given freely, is lost. Our temples lie in ruin. Humans of today give their blind belief to an invisible force. And we are left shrinking in the rubble.

They are so selfish with their faith now. It is exclusive; celebrated in congregations and societies; it has rules, it has restrictions. But love! Humans are generous with love. They give it almost carelessly. It is not an ideal love – tangled as always with a morass of lust-hate-longing – but it is beautiful nonetheless, and filling.

So we feed. We drink deep. We suck away like carnivorous babes who refuse to release their mothers' teats. Without this elixir, we would be dust.

We are the ancient ones. The hungry ones.

And all we need is love.

 

~

30 Days Of Writing: Day 5

From a random challenge.

Word:

'Fall'

Let my story end with yours.

Let our bones melt into the rocks,

reduced to mortal earth and

skin and dust.

I will catch each painful drop

of your punishment;

I will bear the weight

of the world with you.

I will hold you until we

shatter beneath the weight

of fallen gods.

Close your eyes now, and hear

the hungry frost-hounds call.

They bay for the blood of the Aesir.

Close your eyes against

the faded cries of the

nerves that bind you;

What has been done cannot

be undone, but it can

be paid for

in blood.

Your children are calling.

The ocean boils with the

serpent's war-cry;

the black air howls with the

baying of your wolf-son.

The beautiful wrath of hell

is our clarion call.

No soldiers from the nine realms

will override your vengeance.

Lead your army of fire and ice

Ride tall as you exact your price
And I will ride beside you.

I will stand with you at the end of days

I will rise with you when your captors fall

I will die with you, and the great Valhall.

~

30 Days Of Writing: Day 4

(From a random challenge of random words, from which we are to create a story, a snippet, a poem, a ramble, a vignette...anything, really.)

'Snow'

~

We found him – her – in the snow. A mare with child, struggling to birth it, heavy with pain and her unborn burden.

My father raises colts into show horses for a living, and he’d begun grooming me to do the same. It was because of this that I managed, struggling, to guide the mare back to our stables. Her high whinnying pierced the black icy air as I reined her in.

She lay taut and struggling on the fresh hay I’d hastily spread over the stable floor. Here the air was warmer, moist with the remnants of past births (and a few deaths). I sang to her childish songs my late ma had cradled me with when I was a babe. Slowly she lost her strange fear; slowly she warmed toward me as I stroke her back, her belly, coaxing out the foal within her.

Even now through the fog of age, her eyes pierce me. I remember her gaze too clearly. The sharp, sentient, desperate eyes. She seemed to be helpless in her pregnancy. Which is unusual; all animals are born knowing how to spill forth life from their wombs. Humans wander into it fumbling and second-guessing, but not beasts.

I had barely a year of experience in my unskilled hands. So I did my best: I cradled her, sang beneath my breath, held her firmly and reached between her kicking legs as the final throes arrived and her neighing reached a crescendo.

I was not prepared for what happened next.

* *

For what seemed like an hour I sat there limply as everything I knew – about horses, about birth, about life – whirled dervish-like in the cooling air of the stable.

The mother’s eyes fluttered close; the slender body curled up limp and exhausted on the bloodied hay. Its offspring looked up at me with limpid eyes. A single snowflake landed on its perfectly formed nose.

It seemed there was nothing left for me to do.

I looked down at my suddenly-useless hands. This was nothing I’d ever been trained for.

Finally, I got up and wrapped the foal in a blanket. Whatever this creature was, it was a baby and needed shelter. That was when I heard it.

“Leave him with me.” A clearly human voice, heavy with post-natal fatigue and fading into slumber.

I knew better than to do otherwise.

They’d be gone by morning. When daylight came, they would be swept away with the wind, like a snowflake not meant to be caught by mere human hands. I had had a peek into something I was not part of; that I and my kind would never be a part of.

So I left the colt with its changeling parent. I stumbled blindly back to the familiar warmth of home, leaving this dream-like vision behind: a beautifully formed man, shivering just slightly despite his nakedness, embracing his newborn child – a beautiful, dove-grey, eight-legged foal.

~

30 Days of Writing: Day 3

(From a random challenge of random words, from which we are to create a story, a snippet, a poem, a ramble, a vignette...anything, really.)

'Restless'

“I’m telling you, I DON’T sleep. Least, not till it’s nearly time to wake. I drag myself from bed with every fibre of my being screaming for me to lie back down. I pour searing coffee down my gullet in some faint hope that it will do something. You’d think after three nights of the damn same I would drop dead from sheer exhaustion. But no! Come nightfall, I have the energy of a million suns. Who cares that the darkness beneath my eyes tell a different story? I am mad. I am magnificent. I draw insanely detailed doodles and dance and debate furiously over little things. Don’t try to tame me. I own the night. And the day will not defeat me.”

~

30 Days Of Writing: Day 2

From a random challenge.


'Accusation'

He looks at his captors with accusing eyes. A fallen messiah, an explorer of worlds, he speaks of the emptiness before us and how we can save ourselves. He sings songs in alien tongues. He touches your skin with graceful hands that have held unfathomable things. But he is a stranger in a strange land. He is not to be trusted. They have caged him without knowing that no cage can hold him. Already the planet is disintegrating. With or without him, we are hurtling toward our doom. He has come to warn us. But we will not listen. We never do. And so his accusations fall like wilted petals at our ignorant feet of clay.

~

30 Days Of Writing: Day 1

From a random challenge.



'Beginning'

In the beginning, there was you and me. Raw and soft, we rose from the earth with craven claws and half-blind eyes, racing toward the light to fill our empty senses. We poured the sun into our nerves. We danced as joy ran down our face in cool rivulets. Our voices broke the skies as we uttered our first words and sang our first stunted melodies. Our untried fingers groped toward each other as we slowly made sense of our faces. Our twitching noses. Our webbed feet. We didn’t know what or who we were, but we were happy.

~