ink dark moon

writer of fiction and poetry: romantic fantasy + shades of fabulism | ©2015

[rcleyne]

are you still active? you are my biggest inspiration and you have been for like 4 years. i hope you're well.

*shows up 2 years late with starbucks*

Hiya anon, I have no way of knowing if you'll see this, given how long it's been, but I want to answer for you and anyone else having the same question.

I'm back, sort of. Soft back? Even without the state of the world these past couple years, personal circumstances ended up benching me for a while and I'm not entirely back on my feet. I lost a parent (for reasons unrelated to covid) and I'm coping with burnout from work while also, hopefully, navigating a career change, all alongside the usual mental health concerns (oh SAD, how I have not missed you, let me enjoy my favourite season in peace). It's been a lot of running on empty or close to it.

I admit I haven't written much over the past few years, and that muscle--of keeping a writing habit--has atrophied some. So I can't say when I'll have new work to share; I have plenty of ideas and notes though. I miss being creative and definitely have plans to return to writing.

This space might not see a lot of activity for now, but you can catch me more on my craft/inspiration blog, a sort of 'behind the curtain' to this writeblr. It's a lot of inspo reblogs for projects I have, in varying stages of development, along with posts about writing craft. My ask box is open there as well, if anyone's looking to chat.

This ended up more long-winded than intended, so I'll wrap up here. I hope you've been keeping well, anon, and that these couple of years have been kinder to you.

Much love xx

[rcleyne]

The shadows to the west speak of you, another who shares of my fate.

How terrible it is, to be the first lover to die, and more terrible still to hope and then hope in vain. In betrayal. We are shaped by the same tragedy, kindred in so many ways, but sometimes all I can feel is seething envy at the kinder hand you have been dealt.

He came back; when your love could not meet you in life once again, he met you in death. Nothing is forever or final like the afterlife, and your underworld, your Hades, is a dream I would have spent mine in. Here, Yomi is not gentle; it devours, it rots. Even a goddess in heaven becomes little more than ravaged flesh and maggots. I died in flames and woke in wretched hunger, crawling and begging for food that I knew would trap me further -but I was so hungry. Izanagi never forgave me.

And so I never forgave him.

Your husband looked to you in love, mine looked to me in power. In those moments before he broke faith with me, I had never hoped more, had never loved him more -but a god’s heart never breaks without consequence. For his disgust and my rage, each dawn is a thousand deaths and a thousand five hundred lives strewn between us.

Mortal lives are fleeting but their hearts are vast, and perhaps that is the only difference that matters. Why you have your lover back in your arms while I scream and cry against a boulder that cannot be moved.

Why you are at peace, and I am not.

— To Eurydice, From Izanami // (c.ruth)

@femmefatalenet | event four | Izanami

[rcleyne]

It never ends in love. Your Lady Waterfall is sublime, every colour you didn’t know how to dream; and in the spaces between the notes of her biwa, you’ll think you hear the weight of something true. She gives you such days and nights, but a spider’s touch, her lips in a kiss -these are still venom and this is you quietly dying for her. Is it because you lived that first day, and so called it something more? It never ends in love, but it always ends: here, her web around you and water in your lungs, the taste of sufferance exquisite on her tongue.

said the tengu to the woodcutter // (c.ruth)

@femmefatalenet | event three | Jorogumo

[rcleyne]

This is our city burning.

We were happy here, once. With the sun and sea, and summers we wished would never die. You had come to me, one of those glittering days, like a storm so impossible and lovely—

I didn’t see the blood on your hands, or how smoke and ash trailed in your wake.

-

Still, you dreamt of softer things; I ached for the same with you; and I like to think we found them in each other’s arms.

If only for a little while.

Because there was the world beyond our window and my love, and, like a thief in the night, you returned to it.

-

Yours is the touch of fire: it melts skin, melts bone. And then there’s me who never quite learned to let go, so your every conflagration becomes a necessary act of resurrection.

It’s not the first time, the second, or even the third, and I’ve left my marks too. The deep lines I’ve scratched over shoulders and spine, like the march an army takes through snowy mountain passes.

-

This last time, we’re kissing, and your hands on me burn still. You’re a kiss of love turned savage, salt upon the scorched earth of my bleeding lips and tongue.

I pull you closer, breathe you deeper. Annihilation like this should only ever be consuming.

You remake this place for no new love to grow, making a monument of my ruins so all others know you’re the only one who will ever be here. This is our city burned. But, once…

we were dreaming in paradise.

— Delendi Sumus // (c.ruth)

#145 overthrow

[rcleyne]

write more gay/lgbt prose and poems!!!! your writing is absolutely lovely!!!

I’m glad you’re enjoying my work so far, thank you!! Have no fear anon, more lgbt poems are definitely the plan. :’)

For now I’m focusing on icarus x apollo and expanding that into an Apollo-centric series, Sleep, Sweet Apollon. While it will feature the occasional mention of other gods and Apollo’s paramours, it always circles back to his relationship with Icarus.

[rcleyne]

Your apollo x icarus is absolutely amazing. You left my chest hurting and hollow.

Oh gosh, thank you so much! Writing it felt much the same tbh so I’m happy that it came across well in the piece. I’m hoping to write more for them because I am nowhere close to being done with these boys ♥

[rcleyne]

He wonders if they all leave, not because of the burn of his touch, but from the plague beneath his skin. ('gone' hurts less than saying ‘dead')

waka #1 the sun dreams of inescapable things // (c.ruth)

#334 loved by a god

[rcleyne]

I just found your writing, and I was shocked because it is stunning. I adore it so much, and I just wanted to write a quick thing about how you're amazing and I'm constantly astounded by how amazing poetry can be. Your writing is the type that leaves chills in someone's body, the type that makes an impact onto them, the type that utilizes words so that they mean everything.

I need to start with: I AM SO SORRY RESPONDING FOR THIS SO LATE. I’ve been lost in my head for a while now and not in the fun way, and god I’m really sorry for letting your ask sit in my inbox for so long. Especially because it’s just such a lovely message.

Honestly, I saw this first thing waking up in the morning before getting ready for work and it put such a smile on my face. Thank you so much for your kind words, they mean a lot ♥

[rcleyne]

ACT I: You’re in love with the stars, how they glitter like dancers across a velvet sky. You can’t understand mama’s tears or her horror when you say you want to be one, so you never stop wanting for something bigger than your skin. ACT II: You’re dying in the arms of a god who loves you -blood in your mouth, tears in his black eyes. Didn’t mama warn you? How we suffer for their love, and how we suffer for their pride too. His whispered vow, “I’ll fix this.” Then he kisses you, but you're sure it’s goodbye. INTERMISSION: (Ganymede. Callisto. Arcas. Orion. Europa. Perseus. Io. Andromeda. Cepheus. Cassiopeia. Heracles. Coronis. Asclepius. Castor. Pollux. Orpheus. You never bothered to learn their names, did you?) ACT III: It’s like he takes a match to your soul and sets it on fire. And you’re bleeding light from between the cracks, ripped apart into something you thought you wanted to be. A wreck of shining splinters that he raises into the night, he’ll call you perfect and call this heaven, but it’s so so cold. ACT IV: No one told you about the gravity or the fusion, how everything human about you must first collapse. That every second of your new forever will feel like choking, because you were once a creature with lungs. Nothing lives here and you realise: stars are silent only because they have no voices with which to scream.

Astrificare // (c.ruth)

#006 starshaping

[rcleyne]

I'm not usually a fan of icarus x apollo but oh my gosh your last poem was breathtaking

I definitely gave a little shriek of joy when I saw this message. I’ve always loved icarus x apollo myself, so it makes me really happy to hear that you enjoyed my first poem for them. I’m quietly gushing at it being called ‘breathtaking.’ 

Thank you so much for your lovely words ♥

[rcleyne]

You remind me of Rome. I’d say it starts with your mouth, in the way that you eat the flesh of man and drink the souls of the divine, growing into something history can’t ever forget. It’s in your eyes too; everyone says they’re blue but I see the flash of marble, how you’re sculpted more like a monument than a human, deathless. Then your mind betrays you because all you want is to cut the world on the too-sharp edges of law and order, and somewhere between those two things you found war. You are a creature of glory and you wear its crown as if it was only ever yours, like it’s not the spoils of someone else’s defeat. You’re a city, you’re an empire but please, my love, take care and remember: Rome burned too.

For All Doomed Conquerors // (c.ruth)

#469 burying ashes

[rcleyne]

‘You’ll kill him,’ Poseidon tells him, with the calm of a sea at its most dangerous. ‘You love him and you won’t mean to, but you will.’

Apollo glances at him sharply, ‘You’re the one who drowns him.’

Poseidon’s smile is smug and serene, and he hates it, ‘Yes.’ Then he’s leaning forward, lips brushing his ear in a caress of salt-wind-wet that would feel too intimate if Apollo didn’t know it to be anything other than spite. ‘But out of ruinous love for you,’ murmurs the sea, ‘it’s into my arms he’ll fall.’

A strangled shout—

A crash of waves against the shore—

and Poseidon is gone.

Apollo remains there, hollowed out and worn because he can picture it all too well. The boy with a heart overfull and yet still so hungry. His eyes, how they’ll turn from ecstasy to agony as he learns that you can be destroyed by what you love. A small eternity of falling, the despair of it and the longing.

He thinks of Icarus’ back, the supple curve he’s so often traced, and the marks he’s put there. Because if the boy is greedy, then oh how the sun is too.

He thinks of Icarus breaking upon the waves and—

an ocean embrace putting him back together, a smile of triumph against soft skin, hands and lips soothing the burns on his back with a pleasure to hide the pain.

Those hands and lips are not his own, and Apollo finds he can barely breathe.

— the sun dreams of murder // (c.ruth)

#421 Icarus with burns on his back

[rahabs]

We’ve made these words to translate this hunger of you. (insp.)

[rcleyne]

Where does your inspiration come from? Are you in love? In lust?

I am neither in love, nor in lust, no. It’s hard to say precisely what inspires me, because god there’s so so much, but I would say definitely from observing the world around me, and feeling too much in it. More than I like sometimes.

[rcleyne]

They’re too like their father -Susanoo with his rage & Tsukuyomi, his disdain. Because in their divinity are the echoes of a sire who cast away his wife to rot. A heaven that is too broken to stay alive. // She’s so like Izanami, Amaterasu hears her father think. The thought savours of pride. Beauty. Power. Sublimity. But—  just there, hidden beneath the diamond & sun-bright brilliance of her skin, is vengeance too. // The blood of those she loves is everywhere. The storm smashing them all into a shattered trail of heartache, while the moon shines down as if to say, ‘look sister, look how red these broken things are.’ From her rage & from her tears: a seed of wrath blooms. // She knows the girl is breathtaking & impossible in all the ways only a goddess can be. Oh how she knows. She’s tasted the nascent dawn on Ame no Uzume’s lips before, drunk the laughter of a universe that only seems to know joy. But now the girl dances as if the world depends on it -because it does. As if gods could die -because they can. It’s not enough, not enough. I’m so sorry. // Amaterasu does not forgive & with eclipse-coloured hands she pulls at the edge of everything. At the earth, her father’s beloved lands; at the dread grottoes below; at the heavens with its bastards. She pulls to see them all tumble down. She sets and does not rise again, a promise that the sun is not only a creature of burning, but of quiet suffocation too: here’s the storm, choking on empty; the moon, collapsing into its own hungry shadows; the dancer-girl, weeping for a mercy that never comes. // Here’s the world that sleeps as if it never stopped.

here lies takamagahara // (c.ruth)

#240 broken gods

[rcleyne]

They say how we rage, with something jagged and sharp to the way we love. Except I've never known anyone half so soft and gentle as you. So they say: the world is a quiet place when you're the eye of the storm.

haiku #3-5 the storms they put in cages // (c.ruth)

[rcleyne]

i come to life with your hands, born in the shape of your fear and also your need. i eat the cobwebs and monsters of this house (your heart) this dark (your mind). if i had hands of my own, i would brush that tender inside of your wrist, and trace your jaw and cheek to your lips. instead i am this: light, and a crackling flame like a mouth that aches to kiss you. so please, please be careful— be stronger than my cindered desires: mine is a love that can only burn. (and i love you so much more than that)

The World in Love .candle flame // (c.ruth)