8

It’s been a couple days
Since I last wrote you.
Last time you saw me
My body was being impaled
By enemies fiercer than ev’ry
Villain you’ve met, dear,
For the Four reside in, were
Generated by me,
Who idolises Sherman,
Who believes there’s mercy
In the devastation of a total war.
The Four who were laughing
Wore only one face;
It was mine, dear.
That foreign thing which
Everyone identifies as me.

Four, killed by one;
Enter my oldest of enemies,
The only one who can scare me,
Whose ire and power
And will to devour all terror
Can quite isolate me;
Dual wielding twin swords,
Air singing death ‘longside irony;
Welcome the king to the battle,
Behold the master of tyranny.
Drenched in the red,
Tongue lapping at lips stained by
The blood of the fallen,
Standing right over me,
Pointing his blades at my exposed
And docile throat.

Quite natural is he when he gloats.
Mockingly grinning.
Round his fleet wrists
His blade’s spinning,
Other one touching my vocal cords,
Silencing me effectively.
The blade does not touch me,
Yet pre-emptively my voice is gone;
My silence is submission.

But I see you, there. Off.
Your eyes are wide with fright,
Full of query.
How could I so easily rupture my throat,
Send my blood soaring across the sand?

Above, my mind is quaking.
The sky has not been kind to it.
Thunder broke its wings;
Lightning ravaged its body.
My mind is a decimated ship,
Haunted by spectres.
Some, memories of whim,
Others, reveries of what was.
It is the perfect historian.
It files away a whole life.
Replays, recites on command.
The storms have torn the disc;
The rudder is cracked, the oars disabled,
The sails ripped or on fire.
The ship is spinning, spinning,
Spinning, spinning, spinning.
Its captain lays on the shore.

He holds his heart in his
Severed hand; only the habits
Of sinew keep it from slipping
From his split, aching fingers.
His eyes spy that hapless, heeling thing,
The ship he used to steer,
Stern battered and shattered,
Ripped through by cannon-fire.
He wishes he could cry.
The ship is moored by circumstance.
He, its captain, has failed.

I stand above him, his warden,
His torturer. My sword nicks his throat.
A victim of his stands aside,
Unable to act. She wants to, as I.
Every tortured person holds their
Torturer prisoner.
He, the broken captain, holds
Me, his flayer, piercer, warden, prisoner.

I hate him for it.

I wish he would die,
The weak, murmuring, pathetic —
I inspire such fear in him.
He knows his part in my suffering.
He knows I do as he intended.
He needs me. I hate him.
I see you looking at him,
Face distraught at the mewls of
A poor man’s defeat.

What do you see in him?
I’ve splayed his hollow chest
For you to peer; gaze
Into his emptiness.
Don’t you see the void?
Feel the chill emanating from his bones?
He is worthless. He knows it.
Voids are abhorred by nature.
Nature, the Cosmos, is his god.
His true devotions lie with it.
And yet he spits in the its face
By his very existence.

I slice off his lips, so he cannot.
If I were to let him die,
He could not suffer.

Did he tell you?
That he made me,
Bound me to the desolation
He calls a mind?
Did he tell you of his boatswain?

Your eyes, those oceans,
So soft, tell me otherwise.

Shall I free us both?
End our suffering?
I place the tip of my swords
Atop the heart in his hand,
That cracked slab of what once
Had been beautiful.

I push; my swords shatter.
His body is mutable; it is his heart —

My heart, that matrix
Of moonsteel and starfire,
Is not.
It is as immutable as the cosmos.
Its innards may coagulate and shift,
But, at the end, as in the beginning,
All is one.
His blades become but glittering shard;
One is his, the other mine.
Both broken.
He kneels before me, screaming.

The voice I lost leaves him.
The body we share melts; we
Are abandoned, and upon that
Crimson, horrid beach, that
Mediary, blood-soaked.
Nothing but my heart remains;
Captain and boatswain, dissolved.

The shore imbibes its meal,
A sacrifice made willingly,
The dissolution of material.

I have told you, milove;
I am an alchemist.