#mythic
The pine stands upright, illuminating even at first sight.
It has not been planted; it has always been rooted.
The wind harasses its leaves, yet it feels affection.
The storm strikes its branches, yet it remains unfallen.
The spruces do not turn toward it; the pine watches them all from above.
It knows which is which, but it is known by none.
Its hollow is as large as the forest, a keeper of timeless legends.
Its roots are as old as the forest, covering the soil like tentacles.
It is nature’s impostor, and that is its sincerity.
It is nature’s protector, and that is its duty.
It is the mother, yet has never raised a fighter.
It is the father, yet has never had a daughter.
Its children have forgotten it; it still feeds them.
Its descendants have renounced it; it is still within their spirit.
The pine stands upright; even its posture lifts it to the summit.
It wonders without surprise whether one day the chosen one will see.
The one it chooses is the whole forest, everyone.
The one it means to choose is no one.
It does not wait; it keeps the depths for the select.
It flees into its labyrinth without hiding; the spruces do not know this is a test.
Away from its lost children, it leaves only flat ground on the surface.
Always their shadow, it keeps living in their hollow.
The pine still remembers it came from the spruce.
― Atrona Grizel
6d ago
May 28, 2026 at 1:56 PM UTC
Solitude is not being alone; it is being the only one.
Expanding beyond the core, the single becomes everyone.
Solitude swallows boundaries, then gnaws at the edges of the self.
Yet only the edges disappear; one rules the core like a spear.
Only the self does not perish, and it conquers its vicinity.
It builds an empire beyond empires.
Imagination lifts the flesh and merges it with the heights.
Beyond the last obedient star, one traverses the voids.
It builds a full universe above the empty one.
It inhabits the cosmic infinite, incomprehensible to planetary life.
Solitude raises one toward the unseen, and renders one unreachable.
As secluded as a legend, it abandons one upon a mountain peak.
It educates without counsel, punishes without striking.
It is meticulous: one must surpass transcendence itself.
It teaches the taste of poetry, revealing its cold beauty.
It conquers the eyes, rendering all things with solemnity.
It locks the soul within this grandeur and strips away all vanity.
Silence, not of the soul but of the body.
The abyss devours the noisy
and answers without clamor,
with melodies no crowd can hear.
Solitude, not loneliness but sovereignty.
The hermit indicts the lonely
and immortalizes without brush,
with sceneries no herd can watch.
This mind is patient.
This heart is stubborn in its sentiment.
It lends nothing of itself away.
It allows none of its beliefs to sway.
Ancient before all things, it outlasts time.
Touching the world, it rewrites its essence.
Creating without possession, it is noble.
Possessing without creation, it is supreme.
Only the solitary spirit truly knows itself.
And every spirit that knows itself
remains alone with itself.
― Atrona Grizel
May 25
May 25, 2026 at 5:20 PM UTC
At the gates of your longing I shall descend like a celestial dream,
vaulting the walls of fate where mortal hopes grow and glow;
where courage dances in silence and the stars gleam—
I shall rise as love’s immortal wind, throne of every dream.
May 16
May 16, 2026 at 3:13 AM UTC
He spoke his pronouns
and tensed before the door.
His sword,
more ancient than the sanctum
where he stood,
swayed like a flickering flame,
like a leaping fish
caught in the silver light of dawn.
Yet, no sound returned,
no echo comforted his claim,
just the dust that swirled
in glittering gyres
to rest again upon the floor.
He called once more, and then,
in the silence trembling,
whispered one last time:
“They, Them…”
His tears smudged among
the ancient motes
gathered there beneath his feet.
The long dead sconces gaped.
The winds that circled in their siege
groaned with a slakeless thirst,
pounded with a solemn fist,
but still, it stood,
The Ebon Keep
— too ancient to recall
the eye that measured,
the back that hauled,
the hand that laid the stone
that still disdains
the lineage of wind and rain
and all who came before the one
who stood and called.
Such freedoms fought
that brought him here,
such perils overcome,
he who stood against
the dice of fate,
that bears upon each face
a one.
He gave a wretched shriek,
in descant to the keening wind,
and bent his shoulder to the stone
and pushed with such a force
that broke the seal,
and sent him prone upon the floor
— as once those ancient acolytes
had done.
There he gathered to one knee,
witness to the Holy of Holies
whispering in its reliquary;
then he turned and bowed
before the golden throne,
but there he found,
long dead and turned to bone
—the faded motley of a man,
crumbling like sand
to the shudder of wind on stone;
so too, his rotten teeth
rattled in their jaws
that out-endured his juggling rings,
his leathern *****
whose gut and cord
spilled out upon the floor.
Though the bells upon his shoes
lay tumbled on the stone,
his lute unstrung,
yet, there still endured
the whispering hum
of that lost Covenant;
and to This he turned
and spoke again,
unanswered,
declared one last time,
and unavowed,
took his seat upon the throne.
May 1
May 1, 2026 at 4:59 AM UTC
The Archivist kept the weather in glass jars,
each one labeled with a date that never existed.
A low‑pressure system from a dream sat heavy on the shelf,
thick with the scent of rain that refused to fall.
He could hear the muffled roar of a gale trapped in emerald glass,
a restless spirit pacing behind a cork stopper.
Here, a localized frost bloomed in patterns of regret,
tracing white ferns against the label of an invisible year.
The Archivist didn’t dare open them;
he simply watched the clouds drift in their tiny, transparent cages,
waiting for a sky that would finally recognize its own ghosts.
Sometimes, when the lamps burned low,
he swore the jars whispered to one another –
a soft clinking of glass like distant hail
falling on a roof he couldn’t remember living under.
There was one jar he never touched.
It sat on the highest shelf,
sealed with wax the color of old bone,
its contents swirling in slow, deliberate spirals
as if the storm inside were thinking.
The label had no date at all –
only his name, written in a hand
he had spent his whole life trying to forget.
He reached upward, his shadow stretching thin across the archive,
until his thumb brushed the wax, not cold like the glass,
but humming with a fever he hadn’t felt in forty years.
This was the squall he’d traded his pulse for,
a Tuesday afternoon when the sky turned the color of a bruise
and he’d chosen the safety of a bottle over the risk of the rain.
The spiral inside slowed, a cyclonic eye turning to face him,
recognizing the man who had kept it exiled in the dark.
To break the seal was to let the weather out,
but as the first flake of wax peeled away like dead skin,
he realized the room had always been the jar,
and he was the one waiting to finally be released.
The air shifted – a pressure drop so subtle
it felt like a memory inhaling.
Dust lifted from the shelves in tiny spirals,
each mote catching the lamplight like a forgotten season
trying to remember its own name.
He held the jar close,
and for the first time noticed his reflection in the glass –
not the man he was now,
but the younger self who had once stepped into the storm
and stepped back out again, unchanged.
A lie the weather had never forgiven.
The wax cracked.
A single thread of wind slipped free,
curling around his wrist like a question
he had avoided answering for decades.
The Archivist didn’t pull the cork; the room did.
The glass didn’t shatter; it simply ceased to be an edge,
dissolving into a sudden, violent expansion of then into now.
The scent of that bruise‑colored sky
was no longer a memory trapped in a bottle;
it was the very air in his lungs, tasting of ozone, iron,
and the terrifying salt of a sea
he had spent a lifetime pretending was just a story.
The shelves began to weep.
Thousands of nonexistent dates peeled away like autumn leaves,
fluttering into a vortex of unread labels and ghost‑frost.
The storm didn’t want his apology; it wanted his presence.
It demanded the forty years he’d spent in the dry,
dusty safety of a room that was never actually a home,
soaking into his marrow until his bones finally felt the chill.
He stood in the center of the archive‑turned‑tempest,
watching his reflection finally merge with the boy in the glass.
The weather wasn’t a secret to be kept,
but a cost to be paid –
and as the roof of his sanctuary blew clean away,
exposing a sky that had been waiting for him all along,
he realized the only way to survive the weather
was to stop trying to label the rain.
He stepped outside,
not into ruin,
but into a morning he didn’t remember earning.
The wind moved past him without accusation,
carrying the scent of a future
that no longer needed a jar
to be believed.
Feb 20
Feb 20, 2026 at 3:23 AM UTC
When I was created-
In the image of my father,
Since he, too, was fated,
The image of his father.
When he left me behind,
And I was forced to act as such.
Was Satan too left blind,
To his holy father’s touch?
And as my own son grows,
Starving at love's empty altars.
His time runs thin, he knows,
His father’s love soon falters.
He'll leave his own domain,
As I, too, have abandoned mine,
And must I be to blame?
A familial curse in twine.
How a son’s tears might have dried,
Had his father's arms been open wide.
Feb 8
Feb 8, 2026 at 3:14 PM UTC
I began walking before I understood
why the path had chosen me.
The map, tucked into my jacket pocket,
felt less like a piece of paper
and more like
a small, warm heart
beating against my ribs.
It didn't wait for me to consult it;
whenever I hesitated at a fork in the road,
the paper would grow heavy
on the side I was meant to take,
pulling my body into the turn
like a lead weight.
The map was a picky companion.
In my hands, the ink didn't just rearrange;
it pulsed.
When I tried to focus on the landmarks,
the names of the streets would blur
into the names of people I used to know,
only to snap back into illegible squiggles
the moment I blinked.
It wasn't showing me where to go;
it was showing me
what I was carrying.
I reached a section of the path
where the light turned the color of a bruised plum.
There, sitting perfectly still in the middle of a clearing,
was a single wooden chair.
It was the exact shade of blue
as my grandmother’s kitchen table —
a specific, chipped cerulean
that shouldn't have existed
out here in the "nowhere."
I felt a sudden, sharp pang of a regret
I thought I’d buried:
the memory of a phone call
I let go to voicemail three years ago,
a silence that had eventually turned
into a permanent wall.
The scent from the map intensified then —
no longer just a faint hint,
but a thick cloud of rain
on hot pavement and old books.
It was the smell of every "if only"
I had ever whispered.
The map stopped pulsing.
It went cold.
I realized then
that the city of glass
wasn't ahead of me.
I was standing in the middle of it,
built from the transparent pieces
of the life I hadn't lived.
I didn't need to find the doorway.
I just needed to acknowledge
it was there.
I took one breath of that impossible air
and turned around.
When I finally looked back,
the path behind me
had already forgotten
I was ever there.
Feb 7
Feb 7, 2026 at 6:02 PM UTC
I rise beneath the eye of Tartarus,
where the air scent is coal and iron,
and the river of lost thoughts spiral and twist like a python coiling
around my spine.
The specter speaks in Hades’ tongue:
step into the black, the dark calls,
let the Styx carry your trembling limbs,
let the ferryman close his ledger.
I feel the pull of Erebus,
its fingers tangled in my rasp throat
its shadow pressing like a mountain
on my lungs.
Yet still, I draw a faint and shallow breath.
Still, the recoil of my lungs is revolt,
still, tendons of my body cries: not yet.
Cerberus gnashes at my feet violently,
but I walk past three gnashing mouths of flame,
knowing the teeth cannot reach the heart
that has learned to beat through storms,
and all the raging floods of time.
Desire and dread mingle in my veins,
scales of great Leviathan grinding in the swollen arteries,
and the mind becomes a labyrinth
where Minotaur waits, silent, patient,
ready to gauge on the weight of being.
The thought returns, an army of Phlegethon,
promising oblivion like Persephone’s kiss,
but I grip the world like Atlas’ globe,
shaking under the enormous weight,
refusing to crumble.
Each heartbeat a sword,
each breath a shield,
and still the underworld whispers,
still the gods gamble with my pulse,
but I walk forward,
clad in the fire of my own persistence,
my cracking bones singing to the chorus of defiance.
Let them send their shades,
let them tempt with rivers of forgetfulness,
let them summon Typhon in the chest,
I will not yield.
Even in the deepest dark,
I am a temple burning,
a monument to stubborn flesh,
a body that remembers
how to claw against the darkness and abyss.
And when the night hurls its full arsenal
storm, shadow, memory, despair
I rise again,
like Orpheus escaping the dead,
like a titan shrugging the weight of the world,
like a soul that will not surrender,
because even in this hell,
breath is rebellion.
Jan 29
Jan 29, 2026 at 1:58 PM UTC
Deep her robe of night
Overflowing veil of stars
Nyx, the one Zeus feared
Jan 23
Jan 23, 2026 at 3:25 PM UTC
If you were Medusa,
I'd meet your gaze instantly,
For what better fate
than to spend forever frozen
in this moment.
Jan 14
Jan 14, 2026 at 2:20 PM UTC
alcohol is a siren to me —
gentle whispers lure me in,
a sailor, navigating
against the tides
inside a tempest’s grip.
her haunting tune
wraps me in a cloak,
distorts my mind,
enchants my ears.
i heed her call,
and feel myself drift
apart,
stranded
on the waves
of her velvet sea,
towards oblivion.
Nov 29, 2025
Nov 29, 2025 at 11:30 AM UTC
meow, meow, meow
sings the moonlit shadow,
a velvet-footed ghost
with candles for eyes—
slipping between the ribs
of midnight’s broken fence.
A pawprint pressed
in yesterday’s rain,
a secret
curled
in the crook of a dying star.
meow, meow, meow
is not a call—
it is a spell,
whispered
in the hush
of the hunted.
Each syllable
a claw scratch
on memory’s silk.
She is dusk,
wearing fur made of fog,
tail a question mark
dragged through fallen petals,
bones rattling like wind chimes
in a temple no one visits
anymore.
meow, meow, meow
—again, again, again—
echoes in the cathedral
of a dream,
where fish fly
and time is just
a mouse
we keep chasing
through the rafters.
Aug 14, 2025
Aug 14, 2025 at 1:09 AM UTC
Mark the passage of the Lorelei,
Darkness about her all along,
Fate-spun deeds till the day she dies,
And her ode committed to song.
Her train draped over the boat’s side,
A trail atop the river floating,
Her kindly suitors would not abide,
Overstepped, stooped low in their doting.
Her shifting garment in mesmer hue,
Warps and woofs with onlookers' fancy,
They all believed but none saw true,
Save one, chancing prophecy.
For the Lorelei is death bestride,
A loom to veil the space between,
Her trailing garments as a chord styled,
That only the dead, alive have seen.
In the coming she a dread light,
In the going a pale shade lingers,
She is present in both alike,
Her fruits like twilit fingers.
Should one be so bold,
To chance her on a stair,
Best they cling before they fold,
Into the tresses of her hair.
And drift away to lands unseen,
Adrift from terra fair,
Spirited to a waking dream,
Borne up to the Lorelei’s lair.
Worry not of what you're told,
Of what terror of night can bring,
You like swaddling babe will hold,
And into the darkness sing.
For the leaguer of her bower,
While treacherous and cold,
Is the boundary of the hours,
Of all that might unfold.
Apart and yet more aware,
You may espy the raging sea,
And losing yourself will stare,
At that action which may be.
The lady’s crossing span,
Reaches above and below,
Allowing those who can,
Traverse her tresses’ tow.
And clamour about the heavens,
And rend the wailing deeps,
Scour the land of dead-ends,
Break the bodied heaps.
From her seated hall,
She sees the mighty and the frail,
Aware is she of all,
The deeds that come to fail.
That in their ashes die,
That in their waxing wane,
Whose movers fall and lie,
In their shame profane.
Too many deeds to her eye,
Are snuffed in the crib,
Motionless she will cry,
Our Lady Lorelei,
And dream that you will rise.
Aug 12, 2025
Aug 12, 2025 at 10:32 AM UTC
Bury my phone under the maple tree.
Do not unlock it.
Let the passwords rot my teeth.
Let the wind lift the dirt in small spirals above it
so anyone passing by feels the urge to walk faster.
Keep the bracelets.
Keep the letters in the wrong order.
Let my poems splinter across languages
until no one can tell what happened first.
They will plant my voice in the garden
and water it with salt,
never admitting they were the ones
who taught me to bite.
They will leave flowers at the door
and pretend they never nailed it shut.
They will drop my name in the brown-thick lake
and watch the fish stop swimming,
like an old car battery, or a dead dog,
and it will feel like both,
depending on the sun.
They will drag my words ashore, gut them for parts.
They will build a church from my mouth,
hang my jawbone above the altar,
and pray it never speaks again.
I will kneel with them,
smiling with my empty mouth.
They will say the work was too sharp,
the girl inside it dangerous,
and never admit they handed her the knife.
They will polish the handle,
wrap it in velvet,
and wonder why she carried it everywhere,
as if it wasn’t still dripping.
Aug 5, 2025
Aug 5, 2025 at 4:51 AM UTC
Sleep, sweet Leviathan inside my heart,
Until the day and sun drift apart,
Until cold abandons winter,
Until fire abandons cinder.
Wake not when you hear their screams—
Though it gleams, though it gleams.
Wake not to sound nor to light,
Nor to my long, everlasting fight.
Shield your eyes and cover your ears,
Stay in the deep, stay in the deep.
And on the day that all will be fulfilled,
And you decide to spread your wings,
My heart may flutter, my soul may sink
From the thought of the horror you may bring.
Still, for now don’t wonder or try to ask—
Sleep on this lavender heart and bask,
With dreams you shall only dream alone,
With dreams that only to you are known.
For I’ll keep you still for howevermore,
Until every grain of sand leaves its shore,
Until they burn every piece of coal,
And every man sets free his soul,
And every paper soaked in poetry
Has been forgotten and lost.
For now, sweet Leviathan,
Sleep inside this heart—
Lest all the world fall apart.
Jul 23, 2025
Jul 23, 2025 at 4:24 PM UTC
Lowly, all pleasures sink;
No happiness it ever brought.
All joys that you may think
Repaint the pain you wrought,
Shall cling to you and bring
Horrors, woes, and rot.
Woe is you, woe is me—
She passes here at last.
Her voice and her shadow cast
The void that claws and stings.
Her shroud eternal, vast,
She that lives in darkness.
And beauty falls aghast by her tears;
The winding grass dances in trance beneath her marble feet.
Light couldn’t steal a glimpse of her,
Nor day or night dared to bring her peace.
For no moon shines above her head,
And the sun forgot and turned to rot
In her birthplace in the east.
All in shame in unison cried—
Angels and hellish beasts.
For devils could not stain her heart,
Nor soothe her pain, seraphims.
She that cloaks the darkness,
Her eyes that never sheen,
Made of hope departed
And all the forgotten dreams.
She knows every whining
Soul that dared to dream
Jul 23, 2025
Jul 23, 2025 at 3:41 PM UTC
We blend together like honey and milk,
Like razor-sharp blades on pearly skin,
Like widows to dark apparel cling—
We are together with flowers and spring.
In her arms were forty streams,
And stars in her hair—seven.
She sat above the angels’ wings,
And they carried her to heaven.
There to dwell—where, I can’t tell.
Too far, too soon, she swayed and fell.
The sky hid her without farewell,
Beyond all earthly possessions.
Jul 23, 2025
Jul 23, 2025 at 3:47 PM UTC
It was winter when I descended into the river,
Descended to beseech her to teach me about her flow—
On a dark night where beasts and fiends shake and quiver,
Where the only light was her silky, glistening glow.
Upon her arms I knelt humbly as I
Shivered.
Before her majesty, I was struck with frightening awe.
I cried and cried, and with hazy eyes I prayed to be delivered,
And then I heard her speak—
What frightening things she spoke.
Jul 23, 2025
Jul 23, 2025 at 4:06 PM UTC
She bites the pomegranate,
not with hunger,
but with a soft kind of ache,
like remembering a song too late at night.
Juice ribbons down her wrist
in rivulets of rubies,
sanguine silk,
each seed a small beating heart
she swore she’d never swallow.
The orchard hums,
a low, bone-deep thrum of honey-thick dusk,
where shadows sleep in the eyes of foxes,
and the air tastes like cinnamon secrets.
There is gravity in sweetness,
a tug between teeth and truth.
She thinks: love is a fruit with a rind too thin to protect it
and eats anyway.
Inside her chest:
a garden blooming in reverse,
petals folding,
color bleeding into absence,
the sound of something unripening.
She is full now,
of myth, of molten memory,
of something holy and ruinous.
She smiles,
and the world forgets
what season it is.
May 29, 2025
May 29, 2025 at 11:29 PM UTC
every evening i slaughter the sun.
every evening i cut her up on unforgiving mountain peaks
i dip her blood orange blistered flesh in saltwater;
i do this for the moon.
the sun gurgles as she drowns
Sep 17, 2019
Sep 17, 2019 at 4:43 PM UTC
The
moon now
floods the snow
with a silvern
kiss
In
a robe
the shade of
night trimmed with star
jewels
She
sails on
death's white mist
bathed in eldritch
days
Runs
upon
the open seas
of flame and ice
free
Sweet
musky
rose from fields
blooms from Milky
Ways
Jun 17, 2018
Jun 17, 2018 at 10:48 AM UTC
(Sonnet)
She came upon a meadow, then she undressed;
And when she was naked, the meadow blushed.
Softly she tread, floating above the clover
Seas. Suddenly lost, bold honey bees forgot
The scent of flowers blooming. Iridescent wings,
Humming birds, monarchs, dragons, flying in
Procession and the mushrooming dew now rising
Began to swell, raining upwards into the mystic
Blue heavens and the trees beyond that clearing
Stood longingly amazed, so green their spying
Gaze, when all the myriad flowers loosely fell
And all the gathering of colours faintly dimmed.
She came upon a meadow, then she undressed;
And when she was naked, the meadow blushed.
.
May 8, 2018
May 8, 2018 at 8:12 PM UTC
Cry not beautiful sister
For although you might now miss her
Our equine friend will live in us
The entropy of justice thus
Will make her but immortal
Bring forth the divine wings of tragedy
Laced with rainbow droplet fantasy
Cantering our memories
Through this vigil ceremony
To a time before the dust
May the gods caress her noble spirit
For they witnessed every single minute
The love you share so magically
This mare has spun reality
To make our lives worth dreaming
Let her magic gather the herd
To bring one thousand just like her
To serve so loyally and gratefully
For the grace of our integrity
We owe all this to Pegasus
Long live the angel steed
Long live the carrier of dreams
Reminder of mortality
Unending in our memories
We did not lose sweet Pegasus
We gained all the things she brought to us
Forever
Jan 8, 2018
Jan 8, 2018 at 7:50 AM UTC