The Lantern Knight

A collection of poems and random posts from the Court of Lilies and Lanterns

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DWC Day 6: Anguish / Heat

(WARNING: This Poem is not subtle in it's portrayal of the erotic if that is not something you'd like to read give this one a skip!)

Petal soft skin… the taste of lily nectars honey and bliss, From your lips I sample heaven and find myself insatiable. My body blazing heat kissed by cool air glitter and sweat… Possessed of desire newly ignited by the sight of you clad in color. Paint stained pores and smeared in the patterns of my finger tips, Greedily I grope blind and desperate to mark your flesh with more… My teeth marks, lip stains, the reckless abandon of our act of pleasure… Another magnum opus in the artform of love, a facet of the tangible divine. The godless heathen in me knows them through you and your rapture, A worship of something wholly carnal and in service of your release. I live in limbo in a tangle of limbs that make me forget my name, Words fail, only friction, anticipation, passion, motion. Only the way my world narrows as your breathing labors and heart quickens, I relish every excruciating moment as I reach my limit, As I crest the peak of your affirmations… So close… I taste it, feel it… breathe it, Only to halt on the ledge and ride the exquisite anguish of denial… Just so I might prolong that ecstasy of our unraveling. Stumbling tripping of my galloping heart as your plea undoes me… And I am cast a drift in a pleasure so vast I know the depths of all that is or was. I exalt, I roar, I feel gravity unspool and the heavens open to me through your pleasure. I say your name until it looses all meaning… I forget where I end and you begin. After… there is a lingering glow… that fragment of fundamental truth. If the Act of love was meant as the catalyst then that truth is what I knew before… My soul touched yours in that pleasure, it woke something dormant in me… And I do not know that I will ever sleep again knowing what you bring out in me… You bring out sacred oaths and sinful promises… I am angel and demon… Pleasure and pain… Need and Want… And all I crave afterward is more…

@daily-writing-challenge @erathir-violys

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DWC Day 5: Abundance / Prey

Love in Abundance, So many colors flown High, Framed us in rainbows.

The scattered Spectrum, What diversity embraced, Thousand ways to love.

Beware falling prey, To the boundaries drawn for you, Break the expectation.

I love you stranger, Because you stand proud and whole, Raise your colors bright.

Love who you will Love, Embrace the self you've dreamed of, You are not alone.

(Enjoy my Pride supporting Cast) @daily-writing-challenge

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DWC Day 4: Inadequate / Bond

At the very real risk of repetition, I would argue there is no such thing. Not when the the more one declares it, That love is merely cultivated, Once is beyond inadequate, It is an insult… They tell of heroes, Who utter it upon a dying breath. And we call it romance. Tragedy made a drama to entertain, We litter the hope with wounds, Lace our taste of joy with poison. An art in love unrequited, A love killed in infancy, Rather than nurtured into bloom We break the bond before it takes root. For what? For the narrative, for the despair. And on the other face of the coin, We dismiss hope for joy in love as fantasy, We discount the love between the youth, Call it fickle and false no matter how true… Why do we make Love an ending? Should it not be a beginning? Should it not be what you strive to hold to? Is it only a reward for the suffering endured? Or can it be a new chapter that is learned together.

I disparage not the love for tragic romance… I delight in the fleeting moments of a love affair in youth… that fades. For all forms and stories of such lives touch a long neglected part of me. But I ask why it is we take more inspiration from our pain… Why it feels that there are those who close the book… Who dismiss the pages of a life filled with love… As an epilogue.

Love is the answer, the question, the reason, the inspiration… And yet when it is found and kept… it is as if Tales are no longer woven, Pens no longer scratch, songs no longer play…

I wonder what it would look like. A story that began with love… Rather than ended with it. I wonder if instead of dying for the one we love, we lived. I wonder if I am a fool for not letting my story end just because I learned to be happy when it began.

@daily-writing-challenge (Forgive the Knight his little rant he loves all the stories, it just breaks his heart to know how few see love as a beginning. Also ITS PRIDE I GET TO WRITE LOVE POEMS ALL MONTH)

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DWC Day 3: Shock / Reflect

Splinter Crack Shatter, Panes of a mirror reflect, Light, color, scatter.

Shock of spectrums glow, Fragments brittle galvanize, Between breaths I know.

Ideas die not, As mortals do; Legacy The love I have wrought,

The Mask of Mirrors, What is it you see through glass… Will preserver

@daily-writing-challenge

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DWC Day 2: Disturbance / Vibrant

My love affair… with colors and their cosmic saturation, My stars burn vibrant and intense made more so in the contrast, Light filtered through the day night cycles made as a spinning wheel. Values bloom with pigment and spread in precisely laid watermarks. The potential of bare canvas like a field my brush consumes. I am a riot of gesture and color, light and shadow intertwined. Cast out from me like magic I am weaving making whole the world I see. There is no rest, no respite. My process mercifully uninterrupted, In the throes of stroke and scratch, hatch lines and highlights… A gentle disturbance muddles the state of madness in creation. And I am made aware that candles burn low… and my eyes are sore, That I had lost time in the mania brough on by oil and ink. My sins and neglect upon my mortal being stark and taxed upon me, I feel the weight of them like the exhaustion it now folds me into. I was so crazed and lost in the marvel of a world I'd made… That the one that grounds me had tilted and spun too fast.

I must have only been a boy the first time… My sister saw me stained and possessed by it but something new had happened. She took my paint flecked fingers that glowed with lingering power. When she spoke it was hard to comprehend as if I had forgotten language, words… It was gentle, brimming with awe and worry as she swept away the blood that spilled from my nose, "How long this time?" She asked… less sibling more mother. I had no answer but I felt the crash before I could voice it and collapsed.

I woke with food and manaberry nectar beside me, She had tucked me in and was curled beside me in my bed. She had been stroking my hair and held me close like the only mother I would ever know. My canvas loomed in the shadow like a monument… It gazed back at me in accusation, The evidence of that lost time… or time I had stolen.

I looked at my still glowing paint stained fingers… And found they flickered with the urge to paint again… And my heart itched to know more… the NEED to create. Time is a Thief… I merely had learned how to take back what was mine.

@daily-writing-challenge

(Just a little backstory for the Art-Boi and his magic when it manifested while he was a child)

[cavelloshatterstar]

DWC Day 1: Gloom / Allure

On the isle… built from nature and order, Music and dancing into wee hours under star freckled skies, You banish all gloom… and all sorrow. I long to take you in my arms and let you feast on my words, To know their flavor as they were forged and formed for you, Woven, tangled and entwined like soul threads in a tapestry, A cape and fabric spooled of the poetry you provoke, Would that I could spend every moment feeding each to your lips in kisses, Could compose with the affirmations I can draw from you, A symphony that is the siren's allure, The unspoken but undeniable that I am utterly yours. The colors fly and sing their secrets or their sins, Declare their pride and sometimes their pain… They define, and paint the world a more vibrant spectrum of shades, I wish to understand… but I know only one Love. It is you. Not like you, not of like presentation or persuasion My pride resides within the world with so many colors in our court… But I have only ever known one Love And it is that which I have for you… A passionate blazing declaration that I will make in every artform. That I will pluck like starlight from the cosmos… Just to make you smile. Just to know my Muse. Just to live upon an Isle that is a stage… And a dance that is endless in starlit petals and singing lanterns. I know no word… no colors to fly. I know only that I love you. That there is no me that does not need you. That there is only the way you are the heart those you meet… That you are ever the force of inspiration that awakens me. And that reminds me if it is for you… Our world our stage becomes a canvas… And we live in colors.

(Happy pride from the court of Lilies and Lanterns) @daily-writing-challenge

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DWC Day 6: Harm/Useful

-Haikus scrawled on Elisonde's palace walls in vibrant calligraphy that arrested the eye; declared as vandalism when most would call it art, all warnings and calls to action. The Author never found.-

To do someone Harm, A choice, a crime committed, Know the weight of this.

Every decision, One that can turn Hearts, Minds, lives, Power; Persuasion.

Loyalty is earned, And freely given, offered, Never commanded.

The more you bleed us, The less useful those blades are, A threat without fangs.

The thing about scars, Not all leave marks we can see, Harm us, and know Fear.

@daily-writing-challenge

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DWC Day 5: Depth/Shimmer

The turning of another year, With mooncake crumbs and dappled moonlight, Lilac hair and cobalt skin stark contrast in fanned lashes. A dew of midnight stars shimmer on his skin, Petal kiss soft and glittering in the reverie of my observation. I promised him that I did not want my lunar year to start without him… I kept it, but now I want to promise a thousand more to him, I wish to whisper every poem as he sleeps, Each word and stroke that he's inspired, To paint a world a cosmos of moments we will find, or search for. There is no end to this now. That much I know is true, I am terrified to face a day where his features aren't my dawn and dusk, I cannot accept a life without his dancing in it now, My heart waltzes against his cheek speeding at the sight. I call him a prince because how could he be anything else? Some muse descended on pointe and with one hand out stretched… To me… I lay here in moonlight and stars bare in body and soul, Bound in the cradle of our making, so much more than it was… And yet… I feel the foundation build from the first year to the next… Commandeering gondolas and lighting lanterns… Tasting dense moon cakes and weaving crowns of lilies… Making love beneath the depthless heavens until we feel we'll fall up into them… It takes every ounce of my will not to whisper that I belong to him again, To tell him I know no eternity that is not tangled in his arms, And dancing in moonstone palaces I paint for him. I want to pledge each word an oath, to make an art of declarations. To sing… to profess… to make a scripture of my skin in this lifetime now forever shared. There is no distance too vast that would keep this knight from my Prince. No obstacle too great, and no challenge too insurmountable… Never again will the mother moon or wandering child see a year where he and I are not each other's.

@daily-writing-challenge

@erathir-violys

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DWC Day 4: Failure/Unravel

Stumble trip and fall, Make mistakes a true journey Its how you will learn

Failure is not death, Surprise yourself by rising To new unknown heights.

Fly soar unravel, Plumet to the surface low, Lift yourself once more,

Know trails, old, new, March ever forward for you, Travel as a guide,

Twisting roads a maze, Get lost, forget, remember, No two paths the same.

But sometimes in life Threads of fate do intertwine, A journey now joined…

Forever altered, Souls woven in red silk braids Our Heart Strings bound tight

@daily-writing-challenge

@erathir-violys

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DWC Day 3: Pompous/Blur

*DURING THE REIGN OF ELISONDE- Confiscated messages stuffed down the necks of rebel supplies - Author Unknown and never found* "The courts of webs and bitter symphonies discordant with my sensibilities, Blurry lines of friend and foe, a toxic verbal barb laced with false comfort and nightshade in equal measure, The threads made into razor wire strung between the jabs and compliments antithetical to trust. The Elite within these affluent and influential plot ruin and despair as if it is their entertainment, Tugging marionettes upon a stage of thorns and needles meant to bleed their puppets steps. Their canvas a throne room seeped in blood and tears, the salt of those who are less than. The pompous leaders play at benevolence as they feed their withering host all to eager for scraps. Well trained dogs to false noble words that sour in their speaking, but never their wine. The same wine wrung from grapes berries and the blood of their disposable masses, The callused hands of those who shape their gilded and enchanted halls made useless and into the mortar to enforce their walls. Each drop consumed in excess, each life ended in the name of power preserved… We suffer for the ones that see us as no more than the crops they harvest, souls to trade for richer flavors, deeper drinks. May the drown in sour batches and let them taste their tainted appetites and choke upon their cups. Shatter their aged bottles and rot their barrels into pulp… Remind the ones who render themselves blind to those beneath… That we are the roots that seed their feasts and fill each glass, we are the sweet that can turn bitter… Puppet strings can pull both ways… pull the lot of them into the muddy bloodstained pools of ill gotten luxury… And give those who have watched you wither something to fear." -C

@daily-writing-challenge

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DWC Day 2: Hide/Golden

Hide in gilded lies, Golden standards cyanide, Poison to a heart

Whispered absolution In clandestine love affairs The only drip of Truth

Divinity stirs Eyes laid upon the secrets, Then turns blind away

Why settle for hurt When the cure is in your reach Grope for its lifeline

Drink deep what is yours These dreams, not lies, but choices, Ones you make your truth

@daily-writing-challenge

[cavelloshatterstar]

DWC Day 1: Yearning/Couple

I was well familiar as a painter with the exquisite torment that is yearning, The fruitless, in vain, efforts to capture the world as my mind perceives it, Then render such magnificence in one narrow sliver of a view, A snapshot of a concept so deep I could be lost in the most minor of details and scribe a novel. I thought I had known the extent of that torment, Had lived and experienced the longing that suffused my soul in that ecstasy of struggling to say something worth hearing… How wrong was I when I know the yearning that is for the truth of us in a shared space… How had I not understood the profound outrage at not being permitted to declare my need for you aloud. There are days where my resentment turns upon my own mask, Upon the couples hand in hand and unabashed in each other's love. It fuels my every action and choice this yearning, A sort that I feel when you are a breath away… but society dictates it feel like an ocean… I ache in the fiery pits of my darkest parts to turn the world upside down as they know it. To unleash this emotion and sensation and visit it upon those who keep us apart… All when the only sense in this world is the knowledge that I belong with you and you with me… The yearning is yawning aching abyss within I once took comfort and relished as a path to growth… to improvement… But that wound rent open by the way I must restrain the truth of myself before you is an undertow… One I battle and rage against despite my stoic mask of calm and silence… This need no illness but as fundamental as breath… as water and stone… This love for you is the sort I will manifest in every nuance and potential, Its infinite reach and draw like some divinity that has shone on me like starlight and endless skies. And for all the agony, the strain… I will beg to know this yearning rather than be without it's raw injury… It brings my heart to life… It gives me purpose… It reminds me why I try… I'd rather yearn… than dull my world with the absence of my longing in all its twisted forms… Because without it I would not become…

@daily-writing-challenge

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DWC Day 7: Drop/Premonition

At long… hard earned last… I allow my brush to drop from my fingers, Hours… the hours alone stare back at me in vibrant colors, The answering piece is one that I barely understood. Starlight glittering out in waves, the panes of glass a sky I felt into being. I am a cluster of teal-turquoise curls and a cape comprised of the night… Unmasked our passion erupted from the oils and tangle us in impossible throes. It is a feat of confession secrets unveiled that I cannot bring myself to keep off canvas. My other offerings are subtle implication, suggestions to provoke the question. This… with this I say all the things I lack the words for. For all my poetry I have none that can speak this into being, No descriptions to do him justice even in this stolen moment captured. I've made the lilac ribbon strands into waterfalls. Royalty in worship in ecstasy with just the press of lips to skin. Illuminated scripture in iridescent patterns rival the stars,

I've done it… the work is done… I have no sense of dread… no worry of the days still to come… I feel no bitter premonition of this moment being due punishment. Instead the urge seizes me to start anew, To paint him confessions in the thousands… But like there are no words, no amount of paint can convey the truth. I will settle for this to be my first gift of many. The day my Prince came into this world, Now the day I mark as the one I will gift him the first of the thousands more to come.

@erathir-violys @daily-writing-challenge

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DWC Day Six: Echo/Wilt

Pooling starlight and fragrances of kiss washed skin, The echo of a melody in melancholy transformed to hope, What began as wilted petals now bloom ethereal, Spilling, tumbling, cascading from silken falls that feed a pool of sky and secrets. Mystery and daring thrills a veil loose fitted to the metaphor, Ink and parchment, charcoal and sketch, pallet upon pallet of hand made paints. Swish and sweep, stroke after stroke for strands of hair, Taps and scrapes for points of stars and catch lights. Colors so vibrant I can taste them, Shadows so deep within I drown, An architect, a creator, the author of a story exposed. Every detail I lay down in worship and blend in exaltation. I am undone by this cavalcade of emotions, I feel them in every line in every feathered brush. Expression in the manner which I've always known to be my calling, Dances into life in the lens gifted by the perspective I now know is my own. Every passing moment… every music filled silence of my soul, The canvas I render a mirror and reflect in grand scale the world as I see it. A single… cherished moment as it was real captured and held. Love in oils color and contrast. I love you… brush stroke and pen I love you… in watercolor lily ponds I love you… in ink sharp shattered glass I love you I whisper as my prayer and ode to my muse So close I feel it and near to cathartic triumph of it at last… being real. By now those reading surely have heard the thousand thousand ways I say those words. Have heard the music that awakes in praise and adoration. I cannot apologize for any iteration… For I will never tell him that truth enough… I love you… now let me show you: All the ways I have loved you, All the ways I do love you, And discover with me all the new ways I will love you...

@erathir-violys @daily-writing-challenge

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DWC Day Five: Sunshine/Morbid

So many years in darkness, My world beneath projection and unchanged stars, Scarcity and suffrage, bleeding our people as power, The yawning morbidity of my youth painted in bleak reminders. You learn to accept the cage... Willingly submit to the yolk... Lest you starve or be rendered down to feed the rest. Formative years spent with no sky... Instead a twisted desperate lie.

... And yet today dawn crests ivory moonstone spiers, Sunshine catches on the window panes, And illuminates my world in the colors we'd all forgotten. A week and a day... now looms, but my brush sweeps and taps true. For the sun I can linger and savor every stroke. For the daylight blessing had only known in stories.

The kiss of golden rays like the encouraging whispers of lilies, The scent of oil and perfumes from my fresh pigments... Tight and stretched canvas that drinks in each hue,

Set ablaze in saturated glory in the caress of day In the awe of a true sky.

Many shun and resent the cast of something so unfamiliar I may be night-born but I am Day-living and counting them down

So that I might make one perfect. 

@daily-writing-challenge

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DWC Day Four: Ribbon/Misery

My least favorite dance is the one keeping me from the painting,

A misery of drills and sweep, dodge, parry, advance, constant training,

My foot work now graceful as my mind's a wandering day dream,

The Red Viper's Fangs hiss, whistle and damned near scream,

Yet I am utterly without a thought of any but my confessions in Color and light,

In the distance I am aware the Crimson Moon has risen to watch the fight,

The Viper and her pride laid bare for him to see,

And so she spares nothing in her efforts to destroy me.

The red of the Lord's attire like the halo above my head,

Over where upon a marble and lily pads I take his son to bed,

And as her daggers scream to spare me blood nor bone,

To cut me to ribbons, to gore, into a shallow grave with no marker stone,

I simply move as if the she snake is no threat at all

I step like wind and vault forward to the wall,

She aches to please the lord in his Crescent crown,

Hisses she will make me bleed, and in my failures I will drown.

The threat is thin and desperate in the face of my silence,

And like a feral thing her daggers sing, warning of death, promising violence,

In my world she's a jagged scrape of charcoal and red,

Her blades as sharp as her wit... but bitter someone else is one step ahead,

Momentum from the sprint takes me up over her advance,

I land, she corrects too slowly and my blow connects without the need to glance,

Her daggers scrape splinters from my staff,

And from outside the ring I hear a cold Laugh.

New colors now of rage and fury bloom in the Viper's eyes,

Her anger seethes and no longer mocks me the hiss of steel the only replies.

Her lessons have been control and technique but now,

Now she fights the way her Crimson reputation looms as a vow,

Her need to please his glittering Crown,

One of us will leave this ring bloody, and brought down.

The only red I will be painting with is the hues awaiting me in my studio,

The Lord's stern features twitch into a grin he had forgotten long ago.

Light and steps are not the ones she taught me,

They are the dance my mate and I have come to be.

I am chaos in her order, The light in the dark,

Every time she gains I evade and impress the patriarch.

Her blows swing wide but should be deadly,

Instead I see them in a pattern of her expected lethal medley.

I run her in circles, have her gasping for air;

Then I fall upon her with no more time to spare.

In one last effort her blade nicks my shoulder.

But her pulse is thready against my grip much bolder.

A slow clap of hands and her pale knuckles loose their hold.

I rise from where I pinned her and hope she does as she is told.

Her lips spit venom like acid at my back,

The Crimson Moon Praises my progress and she hears only an Attack.

When offered reward of my choice it's automatic,

I wish to return to my canvas. And the Lord's encouragement is emphatic.

And yet again the unfamiliar words hit me and sting more than the viper's fang,

"As lovely a sight you are in a fight... it is of your art I'd rather your praises Sang."

My footing had been sure inside the ring in violence...

But his praise... it should not be so preferable to his silence...

@daily-writing-challenge

[cavelloshatterstar]

DWC Day Three: Crush/Serious

Meditate upon a year ago, My loft a garden's flowers stow, My muddler's tools grind slow and steady, As colors bloom in fragrance heady, Velvet midnight violets crushed beneath smoothed glass, A swirling galaxy's wroth of hues and contrast amass, I dried the petals in sunlit frames, And birth new pigments, gave them names: 'Dancing Lily' 'Broken glass' 'Lantern's Mask' and 'Prince's kiss' The steady grinding comfort of a craftsman's bliss. With each flower he once gifted, A spectrum, a palate, I have lifted, My love affair in the blossoms Saturation, The patient act of wanton and reckless creation, I swore once that I'd render his likeness in all he gave, To him I owe my everything… my choice to for once be brave. A year ago I told myself this could not be, That someone knew me… someone could see. I had thought myself at best mysterious, And now none could deny his promise serious. What once filled rooms to bursting now stain my fingers, brushes too, The last of dried promises in petals proving steadfast, and undeniably true. A prince's impulse now a knight's cherished tool, To write and paint for him the world he'll rule. A year ago he gave me wilting flowers to make into my own, This year I hope to offer in return proof, that only with him, has the garden within me grown. The light within this crooked lantern's heart, Glows a lily flame… And made this knight know where to start...

@daily-writing-challenge