Vile

For you 'woman' should be redefined. I don't like you belonging in my gender. There is no finesse to you, no art - not a hint of femininity extends beyond the throbbing pulse in your vulva. Of course to the uneducated eye the way you hold yourself, the extent of your breast as you breathe your heavy sighs, the curl to your bass note hips, the seemingly endless advance of your limbs; to those eyes, and perhaps the organs that proceed them - you are the embodiment of 'woman'. However, I know women to be more than that. You are a mere harpy, an imitation of the beauty of humans. You walk with the same prowess, cat like in your stalk, but erect - a true marsupial stride. How long did it take you dear demon, to perfect that humane puppetry?

In all honesty I am but awed, for if my impersonation were nearly as flawless as yours; I'd never have to check my blood was red. I thought the claws you placed in him were vindictive. I long cursed my talons for being all too blunt, unable to keep my love, longing for the squirming desperation of him as a worm on my hook. 'Only fair' I rationed, as I was the disembowelled maggot on his. It was however not entirely your fault. He fled from me for I was a glacier. Yes my heart was feverish, a thousand erupting volcanoes trapped in the centre of a beating sun. But no one knew of the solar planets coursing within me. Ice queen extraordinaire as I was. An expression like marble, with a side order of contempt. Only I knew of the ways in which he shook my planets, the way in which without his magnetism my galaxy would cease to expand.

I softened his skin. It became desperate for affection. So when you placed your claws against it, and thrashed with a lonely desperation; he accepted them with a dire gravity - parting like watery complacent batter in a chipped mixing bowl. But you see sweet doe eyed Satan, you should never have touched what was not yours to touch. For no matter the list of my sins - which i am sure you recite together with a giggle, like bed times stories of the damned - yours were greater. With your claws you caught him, and with your kiss you stole him. The polars to my gravity. The oscillation of my being. If you had turned your wings another direction, your sharp eyes on another man, maybe I could have let myself love him and thawed the ice from around these scars.

I try not to see myself in you. It makes it easier not to compete, to lock you in a box next to all the others - sandwiched somewhere between my father and my god - labels branding you all with an obtuse; 'DO NOT ACKNOWLEDGE. MAY CAUSE RAGE'. I don't miss the taste of my fingers down my throat as I tried to become you, nor do I miss the jealous miasma that breathed from my pores at the mention of your name. Unhappiness is a sickness that loves to infect, thanks to yours mine became a pandemic. When I think of you relishing the vapid thrill of your betrayal I smirk at the idea of it wearing thin, thinner than I wore as I stretched to survive it.

The humour is I never wished you dead my nectarous imp, the way I wished myself. Nor I never wished you disappear oh treasured fiend, the way I began to. I never cursed you, rued you, despised you. You delicious incubus, I more craved you. Your mythological maliciousness saved me. I needed you to curdle; to act less than I believed was woman, be less than I believed was human. You took from me. You broke me. You killed me. And in that, Saint Harpy, you reminded me I was alive.

Always/Never

You're a distraught comedy. The way you perceive yourself. An entitlement birthed from an empire of nothing, a self deprecation handed to you on a golden platter. I was the worm on the end of your hook. Writhing and caught. Why did I not come loose? No one tried to free me, they watched me wriggle - blood oozing from my naive wounds, my guts spilling across my far from innocent anatomy. In my mind I was angelically blessed, the light of you forming a moulding halo above my exoskeleton. For what was the pain of feeling in due of the power of possibility? The days merged by, every empty second became a longing, and in that longing I found you; a purpose. The lost moments that previously had been unnoticed were suddenly on fire with desire. These were the moments of silence, the moments that belonged to no one but boredom became yours, counting towards you. I never asked myself if you were worthy, too consumed by necessity.

Since the fall of our entanglement i've been reflective. I think maybe now that my always was your 'for now'. The days I planned for us were days you kept empty because you knew that you never meant any of the tentative bullshit I swallowed with a shy gulp. Your smile to me was a beacon of security, to you it was just an involuntary reaction to the amusement you found in my gullible confusion. The intoxicated haze we ran through kept me subdued, I believed we were new to the addiction together but you'd been a convert for years, the needle marks barely visible through the tough shell of skin you'd built for yourself after years of pain. I don't blame you for your calluses. To me your existence rings sorrow. For my youthful skin will heal over the stab wounds you planted in it, the fact the knife of my affliction never made a dent in you is far more pitiful. You may think that I am lost without you, and of course your ego will feed that delusion - but the truth is that the part of me I thought you completed was a part of me that I'd been trying to destroy. A codependent shield developed from a fear of deserving connection. How I wish now my ailment hadn't reached you. For in our mornings of mourning, and our honest sunday sighs, I found that hate is a feeling more than love. So as I never felt for you the latter - why is the former so ripe in my chest? Consuming and cold, hate is all I breathe for you now. Hate, and the crippling panic that you won't regret your war cry - your promise of never, your rejection of me.

Lonely

The friends you made in your dreams were gone when you awoke. You hoped they'd left a post-it, or a note scrawled on the back of a rizzla to tell you when they'd next visit. But true to the fickle nature of all humans, those trapped within our subconscious and those we find awake; they simply left. You looked around yourself at the bottles of liquor, their original contents drained - replaced instead with the solid mass of emptiness. This mass was the tumour in you. You feel it between your ribs. Like the shadow to your barely beating heart. You hope one day the mass will become too much. That it will swell and absorb all your organs. Forcing them to become the nothing, become the emptiness that makes you question killing them off yourself. The internal massacre to finalize the war you rage through everyday.

Your limbs are heavy as you dress for the day. You half-heartedly place your legs into jeans. And no-heartedly stare at your skeletal reflection. The day has yet to rise, and the dark of the advance above you feels so perfect. Why can it not swallow you whole? Why must it nibble at you, prolonging your consumption. Is it trying to be helpful, to give you more time? Or is this what it believes you deserve. A desolate hopeless scenery, so you can never escape the matching crushed black of your mind. You can not blame the sky. It did not birth these tumours. They were born with you, and fed off your bad decisions. Gained strength from those who left you, feasted off the loves you lost, the lives you ruined. The tumours are your darkness. They are the loneliness you will never escape. No amount of organ transplants would cleanse you of them. They are in your blood. On your skin. They are you. This is the thought that keeps them with you. They drown you in the fear of losing them, masquerading it as a fear of giving life to more. They manipulate you. Convince you that your trials will heed nothing good - only more of them. You can want all you wish, but you shall never be allowed to love. Because you may think the loneliness is the shadow of your heart. But it is your heart. And it's shadow is all of you. You can never escape.

Shame

We all have secrets. They fester under our skin, atop our veins but below the surface of our membrane. Eternally cankering away, awaiting their moment to be sliced to freedom. For some that moment comes; in honesty. For some that moment is forced upon them, the discovery a scalpel wielded by others that peels back ones flesh and rips apart the sinew - secrets bleed from there willingly, the vessel from which they came reduced to a shivering husk. When he died I started to cry in the shower. It was the only place I felt safe enough to do so. I'd turn the heat of the water so high it seared my eyes, burnt them in my sockets. That was the excuse for my tears. And as quickly as they were born from my eyes they were drowned. Circling the drain like a haunted may pole dance, waving me a solemn goodbye. My nudity made me feel sincere, but the mere fact I hid behind a veil of pain and forged myself a mask of water meant I was never candid. Instead I was a coward. Hiding from my own grief even in the one place I was truly alone. I remember once he told me that he cut himself. He didn't need to tell me because he wore the evidence everywhere I touched him. For him it was a moment of utter trust. In his mirror ball eyes I saw the loneliness he'd always felt fade a little, our true love made him less afraid of the madness he harboured. He looked away from me for a while, the dark sheet that wound itself around his truths was placed across his irises once more. When he spoke next my skin pricked goosebumps. I was so scared of his necessity to me in that moment I had to suppress a scream.

He said the way he felt inside his heart could not be explained by his words. Nor could his eyes ever weep for his anguish. So he took to the blade to make his eyes see his pain. In the hopes that the physicality of it would make his brain recognize the injuries, his ducts would accept its reality and give him the release he so desperately craved. But that pain was secondary. The cuts too shallow. I wish he'd stopped searching beneath his skin. It wasn't just secrets that drained from his body. His life drained away on the end of that blade too. So I saw it respectful of the tears he could never shed for his own life to hide mine at the loss of it. For every one that rolled down my face was bragging; boasting of an emotion he was too twisted to portray. I could never tell if he was more ashamed of the depression that haunted him, or the fact he liked marmite on pancakes. He was a boy of many quirks and I carried them with me when he left them behind. Dusting them off every year as a homage to him. I sit and I drink hot coffee from a glass, and I begrudgingly eat marmite soaked crepes. I think maybe I'm developing a taste for them, or maybe it's now just to me the taste of him. Not the taste of his lips that I remember, the sting of a chemical seasoning, but the taste of his memory as it is to me now. For all this talk of honesty I have yet to disclose my secret, because like the soldier of horror he was he wore the badges of his battles where all could see. And whether in the scars we both created, or in the sheets that cloak our secret torment within our eyes - we stand united in that fact. But the thing that makes me sick with shame, that writhes in my skin and plagues my stomach. Is not my grieving. It is not my love for him. It is not that I miss him every minute, of every hour, of every day. It is the horrifying fact, that sometimes, as the years have gone on; I forget to.

hang over

The crisp air of the morning sat stagnant on my tongue. As if a kiss from an unwanted advancer it lingered in my mouth - not allowing me an escape from its grasp. The clarity of the sky was toxic to me, a festering corpse not supposed for this bright morning cleanliness. There I sat in a shadow of a building that was barely there. Clinging to the small slither of darkness that the ghost of the night before dragged with it. We were companions in the dark. Strangers after its dispersal. Left only to dance with the shadow of my own twisted mind I clung to that familiar darkness - grateful for the familiarity it blessed me with.

I heard the squeak crash of an approaching bus. The drudge of the commuters, their eyes barely focused but their scorn polished. I stared unabashed at them. For I was not one to back away from their gazes, for I was never one to retreat from a fight. Yet, I did. As the doors closed before me I did not challenge them. I did not rival them. I did not question them. I simply allowed them to close, fully aware of the power I was relinquishing - to another sect in which I shall never belong. The scowl on my face my last medal of honour. An armour against a pity I not yet deserved.

Voog

Before I met her I'd never known anyone who had a favorite star. To me, and most of the western population, they were all the same. Blinking or stagnant they were specks of light that were consumed by the neon of the city, only visible during power cuts or trips to the country. But to her they were friends. The things that kept her from being consumed herself, by the darkness as she shook beneath a cold cloudless sky. She said her favorite star was the one that hung directly above the Senqu river. She said it was the one that she concentrated on most as the rough stones in the shallow waters scraped themselves against her legs. She was so thin I wondered if perhaps the stones she remembers so vividly were even as large as she recollected, or whether - like the princess in the story - the smallest pebble felt huge under her malnourished flesh.

She had come so far from the tragic princess whom was once lain on that river bed. She was a woman now. Her bones no longer protruded from her in their childish manner. Instead her curves hugged them, the muscle and fat of age protecting them in a way they never could when she was a child. She still winced as she ran though. Certain injuries never quite heal right, especially without the right medical attention. But she ran through the pain nonetheless. I asked her a few times why she put herself through it. To me it seemed unnecessary. She barely looked at me when she answered, she just continued to lace up her bright trainers. 'Pain is a small price to pay for strength.' she spoke. I never understood at first but the more we ran, the longer I knew her, the more obvious it became. No physical pain would ever beat the torment she endured. But not even the most revered work-out routine in LA could help her with that.

The pain had hardened her. As if her entire existence was an infinitely advancing threshold - a kind of callus against the horrifying predictability of the human race. It took me years to see behind that thick skin, to the frightened child she was beneath it. It was only when she told me of the stars that I saw her fragility. When she spoke of her life in South Africa initially all I got were rehearsed descriptions of landscapes and culture. Even when she spoke of murders, soldiers, hate - she spoke of it in composure. It wasn't until I asked about her friends, on the night after she became my wife, that she softened. She called her star 'Voog', to mean guardian. She said although it never could protect her from him it made it easier for her to disappear while he raped her. She lay naked as she told me. Her nudity her way of boldly screaming that she was stronger than him. That she had won. I felt so privileged to be in the company of her titanic bravery. She said that by distracting herself she could ignore the pain he inflicted on her. She could pretend her and Voog were playing in the sky, that they were chasing angels together. Her friend kept her out of her body and allowed her to fly away from the reality of her childhood, so that when he eventually did cum she could smile at him. As she was a thousand miles away, in the company of all that the Heavens could bless her with.

I traced the lines between her brows as the scowl returned to her face. Knowing the vulnerability that lay beneath that scowl made me so much more grateful for it's existence. It allowed her to leave South Africa - allowed her to find me. A hardened shell for a beautifully damaged vessel as it crossed an ocean. As she fell asleep I looked at the orange haze that hung above our tranquil marital bed in the contemporary city of Los Angeles. The light drowned the stars in the way the darkness had once drowned her; but resilient in their nature they were both still breathing through it. I leant out the window and quietly I thanked Voog for saving my wife, for protecting my favorite star - I like to think she heard me.

Blush

She watched the color drain from my face like she was watching a stranger's bowel movement flush away. Break ups are often described as shit; I never thought I'd feel it so literally applied. She had a snarl distorting her lip, like it was hooked to a line that was teasing in a fish. A lip I'd so tenderly kissed previously, now surveying me with a nauseated pity. That snarl was teasing me, taunting me as if daring my face to crumple; daring my repulsive emotions to announce themselves across my features. I took the bait; lips shook and lids crumpled inexcusably as tears pricked my eyes. Still her snarl didn't waver. I think at one point I saw her skin crawl. Though it might have just been a blurring effect from the moisture that dowsed the accuracy of my vision.

In her defence I was stunned by my own weakness. My face folded like ancient origami, creased by the hands of a widowed man condemned to be alone until death. With each mortified tear, I shed from me a memory I thought we'd create together; the pieces of a life I thought we'd been contracted to build. Unfortunately our contract was void, I should have read the fine print. But as much as I wished to clutch on to her forever as she held my balled up fists in her apologetic hands I was yet again struck by how dry her palms were. The love struck pores freckling my convulsing mitts were never without a confident layer of sweat; a telling sign of my unyielding awe of her. She never perspired such devotion. I tried to pretend it didn't make me wonder if she didn't cherish our alliance. And even as the bitch's claws curled across my cheek to comfort me, I still felt her touch as feather light, fingers a lust stained satin - and longed to nuzzle across her chipped, dull nails; varnishing them with kisses.

I felt the hush of her departure before it occurred. It was the moment of tide before a new wave is formed, but after the swelling break has subsided. The faux sense of calm in a raging sea; that which hides the storm. In every inch by which she turned to leave she ripped one of the veins from my heart. The previously landlocked organ was free of constraints and as such was free to fall. I told my self, with a scream in my mind, that this could not possibly be the end. The denial cushioned my organ, so although it hit ribs as it fell to its death; it was less bruised than anticipated. The fruit on the top of the bunch. I told myself if she turned around then there was no doubt we were meant to be. Obsessively I counted the steps with which she left as if I were reciting a prayer. If she turns now she'll forgive me, now she'll take me back, if it's now we'll be together forever; or now and we'll be welded for life. Yet still she did not turn. Then a panic set in that I should of stopped her going, and a rage took me over. I screamed across to her retreating shadow; 'So this is the life you wanted?This solidarity is what you chose over me?'. My cowardice kept me from moving my feet, fleeing to her as I knew I wanted. Betrayed by the honesty of the woman I loved my body wouldn't let me move, it allowed only words. The words meant nothing, but with her reply she'd turn. With her reply she'd validate my superstitions. With her reply she'd fly back to my arms. Either for how she knew me too well or loved me too little; regardless, although I kept watching - she never did turn around.