Impending

[unfinished, still writing]

He despaired of a sleepless night where none but the scoundrel motel vermin kept pace with his spluttering uncertainty. How could he know what remained beyond the terrible thing he feared?  It took but an incremental dislodging of niggling memories – almost always drunken, sodden ones – to cast him, calamitous, into the insidious shame of irreconcilability with the past.

Nor would the winds stop scraping his name in their erratic, braying oratorios, incessantly scheming to soil, with accusations and fretful remembrance, the luxury of atonement for deaths merely overlooked, not hidden.

He couldn’t rest.

And mired within the fragrant, cinereous grey of yesterday’s grifter, whose reluctant, hallowed gasps foresaw things like unfading temptation and rage – he fitfully thrashed to and fro; swelling defiant against the onerous night, like the startled tear of cotton chemise billowing in the wake of a hot summer storm. He scarcely hoped to spare even a moment’s respite before the dawn, for dayspring was treacherously hasty and often made enemies of the deceitful things one said to oneself in the distemper of guilt.

Where could he go?

© Copyright 2014 - 2020 Seraphime Angelis. All Rights Reserved.

Jeff Buckley

[late draft, currently revising]

and he was so sweet, 

like apples ripened in the autumn sun, 

made to blush from the sugar of my attention 

he’d prayed to God for inspiration 

in the form of an ample thigh 

and heart-shaped mind 

*

quivering too much 

at almost no provocation, 

he thrashed and whimpered 

when set upon by just the slip of my breath 

into his dark forever more 

and together we danced silhouettes 

into the soft foam of a longing, 

an understanding between lovers, 

what the muses intended 

behind the backs of their masters. 

*

secrets encircled our wish to escape the confines of sum and substance, 

we were here and fate had no meaning

outside a desire to be understood. 

how often had we already known the sorrow 

of an unfulfilled drama, 

without wine besot lips 

coaxing the best of ourselves into verse, 

or, impeded ambition: 

swelling, blistering hysteria 

across the cusp of a haunted ache – 

all starburst roses and wanderlust 

along the driftscape of some futility – 

no, not us

sometimes an incidental love is the surest kind.

© Copyright 2014 - 2020 Seraphime Angelis. All Rights Reserved.

this heartsigh nightmare

[late draft, currently revising]

a vagrant tishbite and spiderdust lust; the shimmy of some spellbound kiss ought to have saved her from the cruelty of tedium on any blistering summer's eve. 

but it didn't. 

her veins twinged, fluttershy starlight by night; the crest of a hope meeting its dying claim. hers was the forgotten soul, perishable and cobweb splayed, fretting in its sleep — periwinkle the twinkle of a laugh with lover shared, but rued for its careless promise. 

how long must she continue to toil?

the birdsong of ambient yen wrapped tightly around her, clutching the despondency that lain deep within her throat - bloodstained lace enshrined with twine strewn among the forest. it wasn’t going to give her up so easily, although she crinkle sprinkled glittersilver tears into confessing her story:  

a tumble down to the brown wet dirt of an undead specter bartering with the devil over nuances of lost will.

and with a great and fearsome clap, the furiously hellbent against her sprang from the gallows’ desire misfired into the carrion of her patience, gulping it whole. as the angels wept she slept while monsters schemed and foiled — yet never managed to fully extinguish her verve; the many suns within and beside her: 

sprightly flight across the galaxy like fireworks spritz orange soda against an ebony of space without looking to see why. 

will she be imprudent?

somehow she was always prevailing amidst the midnight of her sorrows but that delusion wouldn’t protect her in the face of corporeal injury, for vultures descend quickly upon nudity among friends — dissecting the sinew, clawing the trust until nothing remains but cosmic dust rust. 

…and the moonset cast its last haunted lonely of phosphorescent pallor into the mouths of the greedily mysterious as though only furtive hearts understood the ache of surrender like she did. 

it was not to be a gentle night or an impartial one.

because to rouse herself from slumber she would need to hurl all translunary operas from her mind and loose the damned of their bondage or else fling transylvanian fiends into the inky regret of an enduring memory without so much as a moment’s hesitation. 

and her hands — dervishly impertinent to the enmity of woe, must sync to the sapphire spangle of her eyes, glinting the ashen, threadbare and obtuse into banished oblivion — thus, rending diamond skies of shadow bordeaux on her lips in the dawn as it’s peaking awake! to start seeking ambition elsewhere now: 

where the orchids bloom and the bow of kaleidoscopic fortune is plucked tight — shot once and again for good measure — howsoever it snaps back — as though lipsuck struck in the heart by a nascent star pulsing electric daylight into her brain so she will wake up.

wake up and move.

© Copyright 2019 - 2020 Seraphime Angelis. All Rights Reserved.