#onepilogues

[lifeinpoetry]

Poem for My Beloved by Jessica Helen Lopez

Part One

For the first time since we’ve started making love in my bed, I think of my ex-husband while lying post-coital with you. It surprises me, and then I lean into the revelation. You are breathing deeply. You are in love with your recent orgasm and I don’t blame you. It was beautiful. But there I am thinking. I think of his doe eyes. His big round eyes that were dark and always earnest, even when I hated that they were so. Now, I miss them. For a single, hovering second, I miss them. Usually, I am obsessed with your newness, the desire I feel for you. Where did this thought of him come from? I don’t like thinking of him while sharing the white sweaty sheets of my bed with you. I push at it. I flail silently as to not show you that there is someone else in our bed. Then. I understand that your past lovers are there too. They must be. Suddenly, I am human again with you. I am so human, I could burst from my skin. I am so human I want to share my humanness with you. I don’t. I am afraid you are afraid of such things. No, I know you are afraid. Or don’t want to receive such things in the first place. I push the hair from your forehead with a single and silent forefinger. Push my humanness away and play pretend. Again. Again, I pretend.

Part Two

After you left, the next morning I observe the dark and rusted stains of my period on my white sheets. The way it blots the thread. It is like chocolate. There is one streak. There, another. A dead crimson ink blot. I see it patterned like a butterfly near the center of the bed. This is a tiny replication of where my buttocks meet one another.

I think it is lovely and marvel at the biology of it. The sheer animal of my body. The way you create my body feral. I am not scheduled to start my period. I think you must have pulled it out of me. You dug it out of my body. You pushed and then pulled with your dick. Your tremendous gravitational ability to get inside of me the way you do. You trembled and grunted its way out of me.

Last night, you joked that you had made me pregnant. You were drunk and uncannily candid. You repeated this joke several times. I swatted away your comments and said that my IUD was most certainly intact and functional, thank you very much.

Secretly, I was pleased with your inappropriate humor. I don’t want a baby. I want a baby. But the blood says otherwise. It always does. I bled for you. Was this my uterus shedding life? Or a result from your violent moon-tide fucking that pleased me so? No matter. I am too old for babies. Too old for you. Eleven years your senior and I wait for the axe to fall. For the day you run off with someone closer to your age. For your fickle nature to shift as the summer monsoon clouds do. In the meanwhile, I will allow you to fuck me. Or be allowed to be fucked by you? I never know. You are the erratic response to my recent divorce. And I am hungry to know love again. Lovemaking again. No matter how mercurial it may be. No matter if my blood is an omen I choose to ignore.

Part Three

I like to touch the swirl of hair that surrounds your nipples. Kiss them to be exact. I like to gulp the air that encases your brown pliable body. Last night I noticed a new mole. I forgot where it exists. Was it your chest? Your neck? The energy confounds me when I am near you and so I forget all the things I want to remember. I like the way your saliva swirls upon my taste buds, milky gooey galaxy of spit. The way it sits on my tits, suspended dew drops produced by your mouth. It is sweet with something I always forget. I always forget.

When you are inside of me I am dizzy with pain. When you are beside me I am dumb with wont. I am always neglecting some detail. Maybe this is the way I survive you, never letting your memory rest. How many times

must I possess you before I let go of this wrenching, rendering thing between us?

This liquid obsession is no friend of mine but still I reach for you. I like to touch the back of your neck. Pull the cords of its muscles like a kite in the breeze. Try to reign it in. The black hair of your head is a glistening helmet. Hermes’ winged petasos. I can’t seem to understand the lure of it. How it holds me close. Captures me in its deep jetty hue. Where is my will?

It has flown up beyond my body. I am creature in need of glutton. A wounded body. Oh, silly silly me. I am a creature pulled into the habit of writhing to the tune of your ocean. I drown in all the ways you wash over me. I am creature and creation and spark of dust.

Part Three and a Half

I look at you the way you want me to see you, at first. You are a young swift man whose heart is a glittering, golden globule. A boy with too many crushes. Maybe too many unintentional, sweet-fattened lies? Like dulce on the tip of a melting tongue.

Then you are a letter. A crude ink-scrawled poem upon the pages of vanilla-hued paper. You are a better writer than me. I am jealous and in love at the same time. I am in love with my jealousy over your talent for writing. This makes me wicked with pain.

I see you as a lopsided payaso and know I am a wrong angle. You romantic thing you, with a mathematician for a heart. All logic but brimming with every possibility, the way geniuses usually do. I look at you the way she might have and I can’t bear the comparison. I am too territorial for my own good.

I am too mad like a hatter with her sewing needle. I stich you in the shape of me. It does not work and so I revise the poem I have sketched for us. You are fickle. No. Not that. You are fleeting. This is an ill-fitting robe. You are wild and untamed. I like this better.

I cannot find who I think I might think you are and so I still marvel at your mysteries. Yes, this will do for now. I try not to look at you the way I want to. My perception too sullied. I would rather wait for your surprises at the door of my house. Wonder at your newness. Stay in the uncharted waters of your presence. I hope I never know you.

Never know you, I hope, and the pain is a palpable saturated thing. I want to be enthralled by the dazzling light of you for always. Let us be young forever. Stupid and traveling without a map. Sun-drunk and lost in the rays of the blinding sun. Let us be strangers for always.

Part Four

The black-and-white portrait of you is a compass. Your lips, bow and fiddle. Your almond eyes hooded and inky with an ebon knowledge. There is your young chest, your vibrant neck. Skin without pores and silken to the touch. It is not yet ruddy with age. I inhale your youth and feel guilty for it. Your intellect is a beacon and I witness only a partial glimmer here and there. It is too big to understand and I buckle at its altar. There is your bravado. There is your angled jawline. There is your neckline I like to lick. There it is.

I have never written this many poems for anyone. What is this? I will go on and on with my words, I think. I read too much of Neruda and Olds and shipwrecked Marquez and tragic Lorca and the crude Bukowski and the sexist Santiago Baca and the lovelorn Cervantes and horny Cisneros and illuminated Wakoski and pornographic Anaïs for my own good.

I read too much sleepy, half-eyed wistfulness. I grow too large with your love. I think, you are a lucky lucky man that a poet has fallen in love with you.

Part Four and One Quarter

I can hear your voice in the bell of my chest. It echoes like a lost buoy. It chimes. It melts with sound. I am a helpless target. I dare not say I love you/love the idea of love aloud. The syrup of my silence is my favorite seduction. But if I could, I would murmurmurmurmurmur my devotion into your ears. Instead I write poems days after you leave my bed. Keep the fire alive with words best whispered into the verse of my desire. I want to choke you with my long, dark dark hair. The longing of my favorite obsession. Watch how your photo transforms beneath my gaze. Watch how I uncurl my blood beneath your body. I bleed like a felled mare.

Part Four and Three Quarters

Last night your face was inches from mine and you dozed. Lips parted slightly and your breath was a sweetened dream. I popped an eye open once or twice to watch you. How close your nose was to mine. How your eyebrows arched like a quieted symphony. Then we shifted bodies. You grazed your hand on my thigh. Still you slept. A prized possession and I was fascinated. Our nude bodies susurrate with our lovemaking, moist with a maddened sweat. I was a livewire. Sleep did not come for me. Instead I listened for the sound of your body’s mechanisms. How it toiled. A peaceful young man in love with dreaming. Still and unmoving in its beauty. This is the meaning of love, whatever that means. A love I will never name aloud to you. Instead I hear you breathe. Wait for the next time our bodies celebrate this thing called life.

Part Four and Whatever Comes after Three Quarters

Your brown body against my white sheets. Fingers like a composer, the watch that graces your wrist, an ode to your intellect. Your brown body against my white sheets. That smirk, that unconscious tick and the way you repeat what you find funny. Your humor a precious metal, a thing to be coveted. Verbatim and husky with amused delight. Your braggadocio. Your dick. Your hip. Your thrust. Your pull. Your laser-sharp wit. Your brown body against my white sheets.

Your brown body against my white sheets. The mound of your buttocks, your back of thigh pressed against a pillow. The way you press.

Part Five and Some Change

Your grunts and groans. Your red-faced orgasms. Your mumbling during our sex. The way you force yourself into me. The way you take your time. The way you ask without asking. The way I say yes without saying yes.

I am split open. I am yours. The way you know this. Your brown body against my white sheets.

Your mouth like a honeycomb. Your slivered eyes like dark almonds Your eyes, your eyes, your eyes.

Your barreled chest and the way you thrust. Your flattened young stomach. Your hips.

And how they meet the length of flesh and femur. Your brown body sweating against my white sheets.

Your pouty and parted lips, how they sing for me. How they dance across my chest. How you take my small breasts into the weaving fingers of your hands. Your hands, your hands, your hands.

Your body hair that sways and eddies like little rivers.

Your river.

Part Six and the Swan Dive

Your brown body against my white sheets Your brown body against my white sheets

Your brown body

This is the only way I know how to write of love. The only way I know how to swallow the lust you enkindle inside of me.

How I don’t yet know how to say good-bye.

How my thighs undulate. Ululate. Still.

How still I compose words for you.

How I write poems for you. Still.

Part Seven, I Think

I no longer love you.

I have traveled against time to finish this poem. I am drenched with relief.

I realize it was never love.

It was love, but I’ll never admit it. It was fire in its finest fuckable form.

I think of no one else since you.

— from The Blood Poems

[excathedras]

@onepilogues.

     DARKNESS  CAME  WITH  NO  gradient to spread upon the skies of Troy,  the daylight snatched away like a veil quickly torn from the fresco painted on the celestial sphere.  The void hums,  the  daughter of Khaos unleashed,  the horrors of that which is impossible to know threatening the king of her descendants,  and the terrible coldness of an endless night sky stating itself as simply too overwhelming for Zeus to compare.  They exchange words.  They bid their hostile farewell.  The sky clears.  Both mother and son vanish.

     Her stoicism falters once she returns them to the quietude of the Underworld.  Her dark brow is furrowed,  her blank eyes churning with disappointment and fear.  They chase each other about her gaze until they turn into a cyclone,  devouring all sense of rationality until Nyx simply cannot understand.  “What did you do?”  She demands,  her voice as reserved and cold as the starlight that shone from so far away.  “I have warned you against meddling in the messy affairs of the Olympians,  and I hope you understand why.  Our kin is above that.”  They are all kin,  however,  but it has been a long time since Nyx has thought so.  She and her brother were quick to distance themselves from the petty interests of Gaia,  and it was her they had to thank for the unending complications that are the politics on Mount Olympus.  Nyx would not dream to participate in such a thing,  but even the slightest bit of her attention is required so as to not let the world fall apart.  Or,  in this instance,  let her favourite son be smitten by Zeus.

[patroklxs]

@onepilogues

   The dogs are scattered through their part of the camp, lying panting on the sands now that it’s begun to get dark and the men have mostly stopped milling around.  Patroclus, on the other hand, has duties after the fighting is over, and the bodies have been dragged from the battlefields already; he kneels by the firepit, stirring the flames to life, but still recognizes the face in the half-light through the brightness of it, and raises a hand in greeting.

   “I wouldn’t go in.  He’s looking for a fight.”  Ordinarily, Patroclus would give it to him, but he’s still got a gash across the bicep of his sword arm from earlier in the week that Achilles refuses to exacerbate.  “You would think the war would spoil him for that.”

[excathedras]

@onepilogues.  ( s.c )

     MENDACIUS  IS  JUST  ABOUT  to yawn when they catch themself and stifle it with a quiver of their lips,  their eyes watering and tickling their eyelashes.  The effects of their elder brother’s presence is immediate and frustrating.  The loss of control that comes with such a sudden and futile sedation is unsettling to say the least,  given Mendacius’s directory of bad relations.  While the mortals - a plethora of abandoned spouses,  upset politicians,  and the shade of an assassinated cult leader - are hardly a concern,  the gods that they have crossed are somewhat of a threat.  They have been trying to tread carefully and let the storm pass in the slums of Rome,  diving in a suburra high - rise,  their paranoia outlasting their impatience.  

     They open the door just wide enough to peer through,  and they examine Hypnos for a scrutinising moment before opening the door a few inches wider to allow him in.  “What,  what?  What is it?  Get in here quickly ;  don’t you know I’ve other ... engagements that need my attention?”

[eidetic187]

↳ @onepilogues​ said “did you just kiss me? “

kissing starters

          It had been an impulse.

          He’d been taking a rare break from his work in running the syndicate, curled up in a comfortable chair && reading. Wes was nearby, as he always was — Spencer had stressed many times over that he could be his own person here, that he was nothing like those Wes had worked with previously, but Wes had always insisted he was doing what he wanted in protecting Spencer. He didn’t particularly need any protection in his private quarters, but arguing with the other man never went anywhere, && Spencer enjoyed his company regardless. It’s when he glances up from his book that the urge to kiss Wesley strikes.

          He’s seated on the other side of the room, angled in a way that he can see Spencer, but also in a way that the sunbeams shining through a nearby window falls across his face. Olive skin almost glows under the light && the sun highlights the smattering of freckles along Wesley’s cheeks && nose, as well as reflecting off of his hazel eyes && giving them an appearance similar to small pools of honey taken refuge in his skull — he’s beautiful. It’s hardly the first time Spencer has thought so, but this particular moment seems to reach into his chest && steal the breath from his lungs.

          When he stands, it’s on instinct, thoughts muddled with desire as he crosses the room to stand before Wesley. He cups the sides of his face, touch gentle so he could shrug it off if he so chose. But he doesn’t, he makes no move to indicate any discomfort, so Spencer leans down && connects their lips. It’s as soft as his touch, merely meant to express affection rather than lead to anything more. Much to his delight, Wes doesn’t pull away; rather, he lets their kiss linger. When Spencer does pull away, there’s a light smile on his lips.

          It’s only when Wesley questions him that Spencer falters, affection shifting to concern that he’d read the other man wrong && overstepped. Ever since he’d recruited the other, he’d made it quite clear he’d lay the entire world at Wesley’s feet if he would only ask; he’d completely dismantled his previous group merely because they’d treated him so poorly, like an animal. His advances seemed to be received positively, even without the reciprocation he craved — he’d merely assumed Wesley wasn’t used to this treatment && wasn’t sure how to respond. Now, he worried he’d made him uncomfortable.

       ❛❛ Yes — you looked so beautiful, I couldn’t resist. Is that okay?? ❜❜

[excathedras]

prometheus  bound

@onepilogues said “ “i beg you, do not hide from me what i must endure.” - More @ nyx you don’t have to answer all these lmao

     nyx  leans  on  the  long,  rigid paddle of the slender boat as it props itself in the murky depths of the styx and the water laps quietly against the smooth reed hull.  the water babbles around the pole as she lifts it,  holding it as the current takes them further towards the house of her younger brother,  tartarus.  a ripple flickers beneath the surface,  and the boat pitches slightly.  the marshes of asphodel and reeds along the riverbank bow and turn in the wind,  a tarnished silver hue under the bleakness of the false sky.  she can see singe marks in the fields,  and split boulders coming down from the mountains,  and she remembers the rumble throughout the palace as something below even the underworld began to stir.  she had hoped never to return to tartarus after the residual echoes of terror and uncertainty during that wretched war which deemed him warden of a dangerous and wild breed,  but now there is need for her to journey there,  though she hopes her fears are unfounded.  hypnos speaks and nyx’s attention is dredged up from the undiscernable riverbed.  “it is not so terrible,”  she says,  “and not so much a matter of endurance as it is perspective.”

     nyx  tries to think back,  tries to remember the last time she went to tartarus,  let alone spoke with him.  the passages of silence are most comforting among the triumvirate of the more enigmatic siblings,  including herself,  erebus,  and tartarus.  gaia and eros are loud,  always loud,  chattering and moving and thinking and meddling.  it seems a nuisance until now,  when nyx finds herself worried for her brother and the integrity of his very self,  and no idea how to prepare her son for that which he might find distressing ;  he was always thought of fondly by the mortals,  but she had never known if the sentiment was requited.  “whatever you do,  don’t look away from titans,”  nyx advises.