#lest we ()

[quaintobsessions]

Holy Water

I wrote about that night. The unseen part of it spelled out much easier than the passage to daylight.

I wrote about that night and I reveled in it, wrapped in your hoarse voice, in a note you reached unexpectedly by sheer force, by breaking the future with today's cruel hands.

I wrote about that night as an antidote to forgetting, but on the rebound I forgot what we said about tomorrow, about being a bit broken each in our own way, about you taking a plane back home to your tower and letting the wilderness eat you alive.

I wrote about that night but I kept all your secrets. Hiding them in plain sight like plover hatchlings, I walked along the cliff path mending it as I went so you never fell.

[quaintobsessions]

True

Ribbon-tied, trailing verdigris with the passage of fervor, your soaked letters pull me in because I intend to build them a slow-smoke pyre;

let them vanish beyond mention of furies and lions, kelpie skins and monster kind. Across time I can feel the candle flame, the delight of lines

making themselves into an image of feathers, of fetters, of an unfaltering heart. There. Fingertips trailing in water, currents connecting us.

Interplay turned from poison into righteous plunder, inviolate, non-volatile, a constant fortified by letting you go:

your changeling skin has set, gone are your name, your frame, your ease with asking questions, with my reading your aim; but my gratitude

is finally the same.

[quaintobsessions]

Winter’s Breath

It was supposed to snow. The air smells like burnt bridges and myrrh.                      In this midnight picture your arms are fading into vapour, your eyes rimmed in black and red.

                    Your name falls apart in a stranger’s mouth, the rhythm of your tricks lost to those who see nothing but your teeth, your claws.

In dreams kind demons invade you. Death swings away and what remains is white curtains on round metal rails hanging without movement.

You scream for longer than a human should be able to, until

your voice goes the way of hope. One day in the far away future that was you.                          Mist freezing into crystals on a window pane.

[quaintobsessions]

Against the Scythe

Under the stars the grass lies lamenting how your frame doesn’t grace it now.

It recalls the perfection of your sprawl; your fearlessness at night. Its scent

misses your component. It seems young but it has a long memory out there,

just out of reach of the shiver of leaves: a sharp blade discarded from warm lips,

a blush from persistent questions, fingers heedlessly reaching for guitar strings.

Green leaf volatiles don’t cut it. Ashen, the grass wishes your hair had greyed,

your impatient gestures slowed. Not reaped without a chance to regrow.