Page 5 of King of Iron Hearts
Water, sunshine, soil
And poof
A plant
I thought hope was like that
Love was like that
And while I had the seed to sow
You gave me nothing to feed it
I am a fallow field.
I kept waiting for all the dirt and rain
Of my life
To blossom into flowers
But I guess
Sometimes
Dirt is just grime
And rain just falls
So many men try to drown their misery at the bottom
Of a bottle.
Why don’t they try to drown it in the rain?
Or trap it in prose at the bottom of that bottle
And drown it in the sea.
The natural remedy for all maladies.
Definition:
Increase the stakes, especially in times of dispute or conflict.
I don’t want to be the phoenix
I want to be the serpent
The snake is not
The sly evil thing in the grass
Of Eden’s garden
It is the serpent
A healer and fertile harbinger
The two twisted heads on the staff of Hermes
The serpent is the middle of black and white
The dual expression of good and evil
The serpent does not die and is reborn anew
The serpent evolves, changes, and grows
Shedding the skin of the past but retaining the memory
So that when it slithers forward it does it wise
She was sharp as a heart attack
A woman in need of sacrifice
And reverence
Who understood her worth
And demanded payment
For her venerable affections
I capitulated to the fury of her need
Cut my heart out of my chest with her dagger
Rusty with old blood
The stain of other lovers
Who had failed to fill her greed
I handed it to her
Still beating
Thumping against the silver platter
Like a war drum
She looked me in the eye as she took it
In one pale hand
Raised it to her lips and licked the aorta
Until it throbbed
“I will consume you whole.”
She promised.
The man is the sacrificial lamb in this one.
I slayed my demons
With my bare hands
Stuffed the heads
And mounted them on my wall
So that anytime I was frightened
Anytime I felt threatened
I could look in the eyes of my villains
And remember
I had the power to end them
What if the beast in the story
Preferred his talons and fangs
And the echo of his mighty roar?
What if he enjoyed striking fear into hearts
So they never again had a chance to hurt his own?
The beast stays a beast in this one.
My love is a fist
Clenched hard
Inflexible
Impossible to miss
When it hits you in the face
My love is a dagger
Cold edged steel
Sharp
I use it to carve scars
In your skin that spell my name
I remain a cruel man
Uncaring
A villain at ease in his skin
But my love for you is kind
If that isn’t magic, what is?
Not all princesses need Prince Charmings to save them
Sometimes
They have dragons who protected them
All along
I am at ease with hatred
Comfortable with deviance
And friendly with rebellion
I wear my wrath like a leather coat
And my venom is a cloud of second-hand smoke
You see me and want me
Do you know why?
Because I am the edge you need to fall off
The adrenaline rush you want to try
I am too close to Death.
He hounds me like a loyal shadow
Whispers dark delights in my ear.
I am his friend.
Disciple.
I learn from him the way to take men apart
Like dissembling a tool.
They learn to fear me too.
A walking nightmare in motorcycle boots.
But what about you, sweet girl?
So close to life
So full of pink peonies and gentle verve.
What would you say if I told you
I wanted to be the nightmare you claim for your own?
It’s the art of a poet
To take something unerringly ugly
And give it the right words
To make it something lovely
We watch the stars
To pull down the blue ink
In the wide bowl of the sky
And use it to write philosophies
About the universe beyond the curved slope of our horizons
Because sometimes
The dark abyss of the unknown
Is less lonely and less terrifying than our own remembering
What a self-fulfilling prophecy it is
To pave a yellow brick road
Line it with exit signs
Protect its boundaries with monsters
And then grieve when people inevitably walk
Down that path
And out my door
The bomb in my chest
Ticks louder
Each day
Counting
Down
To
A
Time
Where
I will self-detonate
And implode
If only there were gentle hands
To reach inside the chamber of my chest
Cradle my ticking heart
And bravely turn it off.
She wore black
And coloured in her many scars
With red sharpie
Like fresh blood against the ancient wounds
She wanted to remember every hurt
Illustrate every painful memory
As a warning to everyone
And herself
That she would never forget
This is a story of boy meets evil
With the face of an angel
And a body that could tempt a saint to sin
Of a time before the boy became a man
When he met the demon
By the name
Of
Delilah
And spoke her title in a breath of supplication
This is the journey of that boy
From the sweet stumble over lust
To the willing jump he made
Thinking he would land in
Love’s perfumed embrace
This is the story of what happens
When the boy lands on the spikes of cruelty
Savagely impaled by lies
Where he brutally bleeds out
This is the story of what a woman
Will do
For
Revenge
The legacy of men.
Sometimes
I yearn for the apocalypse
So that all the nonsense will implode
And the only things left
