perhaps i'm now familiar with the turns of your pale
mourning dove wrists and fingers tipping on china glass.
perhaps i'm used to the cold metal clinking in the sunrise chill,
keeping time on late nights sinking into liquid amber mornings.
perhaps i'm familiar with our lex talionis settlement
and trained to retort over grim triggers and dilemma.
and trained to gauge the incandescent heat through
your flustered hair and your fresh, formless clothes.
with both our sides deadlocked with hephaistos's chains
as a sorry testament to our guilt and shame.
"your deus ex machina is a sorry excuse";
spoken in a coiled snake's whisper. ineffable, irreverent.
i feel your death crawling through my veins,
through the tendons at my clenched fists
and it stops one swerve short of your next heartbeat.
sometimes, you confess you are lenore, eulalie,
ulalum, annabel lee, morella, and eleonora.
or all that which they have in common; to me,
you are iustitia's renaissance humiliation.
perhaps i'll be fed to your furies, perhaps
i have come to grant you the status
of my nyx borne nemesis.
between our words laid bare like an open book, only written in braille,
are a thousand worlds lost in context that a. conan doyle would have envied.
