Right Before I Hit The Earth Like Lightning
REMINGTON GRAVES
The slithering and sordid screech had evoked a sweet surrender to the senses as I plummeted through a clustered expanse—a burning, cutting arrow had broken through and punctured my aching chest. Thin scarlet streams spewed forth from the splintered gash, cradled by my trembling hands, disappearing like spiraling ribbons into the vast blue sky above. Cloud after breaking cloud, I sped and crashed through, lancing cirrus after cirrustratus, cumulonimbus violently coughing as we came in contact. My bare feet feathered almost breaking ankles and contrasting the soft blue hues.
The arrow would stay. There was no need to force the inevitable. And as I began to choke on my blood, a beautiful and faint arrogance tingled through, beginning in the back of my neck and forcing my eyes to fluttering white. The grunting pains became a soft singing not unlike the sound of slow bending saws in a large hall.
My body, though quickly expiring as it fell fiercely, began to vibrate with a furtive fever. My loins a roaring lion, my hands letting go of the small stave, and fingers crawled like frenzied spiders across dip and crevice, stroking madly, digging, scratching, bloody clawing.
And somewhere between a puffy pretty cloud, I shot my own arrow, poisoned with powerful people never to be. Like webs writhing and disappearing towards the sun.
Right before I hit the earth like lightning.
∞
Black Swan Love Letter
REMINGTON GRAVES
For whatever reason, the dilettante did surrender with tender shame, driven empathy and rash whimsical effrontery; the envelope opener lay in her trembling open hands, which rested upon the white silk night robe her mother passed on to her a few years before her death. Beautifully baroqued boudoir at a gaze distance from the foggy beach, now sat silently as it’s lord began to beg and then whimper. She was never one to beg and now here she was, blubbering idiotically at the sight of her blonde hair and its breaking dead ends. In The Hall Of The Mountain King tip-toed tauntingly into her mind and she stood dropping the evidence and raising her arms towards her intricate high ceiling and begun to spin violently. Her hair was a blondfire that blurred in burning glares as she gazed at spinning Victorian tiles that riddled the roof. Cymbals began to crash as she bit into her tongue with carnivorous commitment and gurgled scarlet bubbles and fell to her knees against a cold marbled floor cackling and clamoring to Johan Pachelbel’s Canon In D Major. The white roses she kept from her wedding trembled in another room with activity from maggots and frenzied flies. The silverware hand-carved from Castelluccio, Umbria no longer reflected the hot pinks, lavenders, oranges, and neon yellows of the fields that blossom with violets and poppies in the spring. Her toes became pale as she laid there prostrated and suddenly decided there was no longer a need to pray, to beg, to seek the countenance of a fabricated cunt called god.
Habanera sidewinded towards her in the cutting chords of Callas as she stood silently amid the forlorn lust and languid luxury of a life unmistakably let down. With a thick, wet burgundy stripe on the front of her gown, she imagined herself a black swan…drifting down a river…while snow suddenly fell from the heavens like small feathers—slowly and sweetly.
∞