Member-only story
PARALYTIC
I am paralysed, silent, stuck
in a shadow behind this mountain
I scurry into a winter-valley:
Dried up, shrivelled, weather-beaten:
Rock- hidden fossils, time set in stone.
Evolutions of Medusa’d scare the shit out of me
Even if I wasn’t afflicted by a peculiar petrified decay.
she gazed all the way into me
rubbed away something, eternally lost.
Stains dry and calcify
deep in these highland bogs
I sink into a quagmire-swamp of guilt, regret
Spilt water, wine, I forget, what caused this
disturbance in the weather?
We are no longer together.
No transubstantiation this:
yoked, ploughed, dragged, inchoate into death;
A process has begun.
Welcome now obscurity, shadow,
Winter trees stripped;
Banshees scream into the wind
dry my lips.
I listen for a modulation of voice, a volte-face:
A variation of mood. A tattered lace.
No man has such bad intent as to awaken from sleep
These legions of demons, who laugh as we weep?
