On a pale horse

Tonight you kill someone. Not a faraway kind of killing like a bullet or a button. Or a word. Misheard. Just the tearing of skin, and sin spliced out on the lathe

A sigh. A lie. Perhaps? Incoherence and poetry tangle in the mumbled softness of his drunken debut. Curled feline on his chest the creature drools a silk in translucent symphony. Slip sliding war and whisper into his veins. His heart. His kiss. Click. Turn. Click Turn. Another sigh. Deeper this time. Harder to bring back. And inside his dreams he sees time fused nuclear in endless ticking. Dust and bone on the evening air as the song of the last bird becomes a howl.

The creature leans closer. Breath to breathe. It rolls, silent in victory as the sweet of his flesh fades with all the colours that aren’t red.

And he fights. Yes. True enough an angel in his strength. But daggers and diamonds cut the same in names and games of beasts. The creature twists on him. Inking ruin in triple joints, scarring his chest in maggot and worm. Click. Turn. Click. Turn. A care for a dare. A knife for a life.

And in dreams of Blake he is searching. Searching. For the choice in the never choices. Scream. Beg. Beg. Burn. Click. Turn. Click. Turn. Until there is no difference between them. Conquest and surrender bound to the same incongruent beat. Too fast. Run down. Walk down. Drag down. Too slow. To slow. To stop. And when the knife is offered, they cut. No hesitation. All the way down to soul.

‘Tonight you kill someone. Not a faraway kind of killing like a bullet or a button. Or a word. Misheard. Just the tearing of skin, and sin spliced out on the lathe.‘ The creature curls crimson in its smile, tasting sweetness of blood on the night air, ‘Told you so.’

 

 

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©2017 Jac Forsyth*

*Image courtesy of Pinterest  The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides by William Blake. The painting illustrates a passage from the Inferno canticle of the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri