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Is a boulder wedged
Betwixt thy chest
Bearing weight
Of moving – beyond

Dost thou push against
The peak of unrest
An unmoving
Sought to abscond

Accursed encumberment –
Zeus, come urgent!
Trade distant
For the fond

That feeling lost
To pebble tossed,
Skipped
Across shallow pond

Do you even care for
Did you ever – more –
Stop to think
Or consider at all

What precipitates –
The flood – the rain –
Is the same which
Prompted the roll

For I have no brake
So, to break – my fate –
Is what remains
To break my fall

Now all I hope for
Is coming – war –
To bleed me
Dry and dull

Passion – passed
Regiment – collapsed
Atop sword
Of your own recruit

And yet I stand
Hand in hand
With fallen
Soldiers – resolute

For I am leg-bound,
Surface-drowned,
By pit
Of fruitless pursuit

A victim still
To down-turned hill
And resolution
Most astute

The storm is done
But not the burden
That drums –
A thunderous applause

A wound that heals
Still yet conceals
Heart held
Together by gauze

Bless me – rid
Thine Sisyphus –
Of that stone-still
Chore you bore

Why must I carry
What once was merry
Now bruised,
Shattered and sore?
emlyn lua Sep 2019
Aphrodite resides in my heart.
She has been there since I wished
with no hope of solution
for loneliness to be gone.

She did that.
She Did That.

My love is an ocean yet I
I keep it in the pearlescence
of a shell I found on the shore.
Does my goddess purse her lovely lips
when she feels my fear?

Fear
of vulnerability, goddess,
of your power over me.

What is worship without fear?
Awful, terrific, exposed
to the mercy of your torment.

Perhaps soon I shall meet another
who knows the ache of her in the chest
when we look into each other’s eyes.
I pray for someone who has an ocean
like mine, boundless and full of life.

Ah, then we could mingle our waters
until two oceans become one
and proud Aphrodite can swim there
guiding the currents to where they need to be.
emlyn lua Sep 2019
She stutters on the threshold:
a sun fixed on the horizon.
Bodies susurrate as she wades through them.
A daily routine – but what are days?
The cavern underneath the world admits no light from sun or moon,
Sight granted by the fragile luminosity of the pale, pale once-alive.
She walks through the dead:
has always walked through the dead
will always walk through the dead
Or – her mother was life, is life, above –
She stutters on the threshold.

Clarity.
She no more meanders, but strides.
The sun creaks and groans, and rises.
Breaths short and sharp, she runs:
A tree, an illogical tree in an illogical garden,
In this illogical cavern.
(but this was before logic)
Hunger pangs do not slow her,
She is hungry for change, for resolution;
For conclusion to dim the gnaw of uncertainty.

A globe gripped in a quivering hand.
She peels back the membrane
(like the skin of the earth as it opened to swallow her)
Scoops a glistening fistful of rubies
And gulps them down,
Blood of the fruit painting her chin like a child at the close of October,
Play-acting, false horror, for the sake of cloying sugars;
Her eyes are not that of a child.

She kisses the mouth of He that stole her.
They ascend, hand in terrible hand;
He sits, gestures, to Her new place beside him.
With a smile of crimson certainty,
The Queen of the Underworld takes Her throne.

— The End —