Invariably,
You prefer to come
To me in the dark.
"You're more my temperature then,"
You once said.
I'm not much of a thermometer,
But I am the eurythmy
To each syllable you give
In such settled shadow.
A play of murmurs and fingertips,
You once named this.
Always I see a wreath in your hair,
In colors of Persia,
Textures of night,
And the soft blended lines
Of you I know
Infallibly.

Vespertine, fatal dream
Mistress conjuring shapes of night
Seventeen little fiends
Elegy for a demon’s plight


Alone in my study, sitting
before a roaring fire
Visions so ******
they churn desire

With the dead of night
summoning hellish zest
They come to incinerate
my corrosive flesh

The hymns of *St. Lazarus beckon solace
from the cathedral outside
But I linger here in the bowels,
where my ancestral sins reside

Animistic stares gazing through
these dead-soul dreams
Where another horror story is not
always what it seems

Portraits of deceased queens
looked down at me with blackened eyes
Layers of muffled screams
festered while judging my vacant lies

Years before, my grandmother watched
over me as a boy in his bed;
Endless, ambiguous rhymes of prayer
are what she often said.

She promised to ban the spirits
that steadily linger
But dark twisting hands
outreached and took her

The monsters and invisible abominations
have always been here
Following my whereabouts,
watching me year after year

Subtle ghosts keeping my heart
and house cold
I sat and waited for what my
icy breath foretold

The dreams, the demons, the ghosts
all that severed me
From experiencing the love of flesh
I so forever longed to see


Came the hour the church bells rang and tolled


The dread of things to come
The moans and cries had begun

From lissome shadows and corridors
Like Charon beating souls with oars


Creeping evil fled
to the refuge of my home
To reap the sins
that my family had sewn

The rippling, screeching strings
of a malevolent orchestra
Scored and produced themes
worthy of infernal Sumatra

The flames in the fireplace
surged a green incendiary wall
From the hell mouth jaw emerged
a dark figure I saw.

Mother Mephistopheles,
            clad in silvery pieces with a pale face
            Manifesting atrocities, her emerald eyes
            welcoming our embrace

I backed away from the sights in,
my trance lost in her glimmer
But the noises and choir peaked
in a swarming fit for a sinner

In a gush of surrounding ash, Father Selaphiel materialized
The otherworld lovers reunited,
their bond revitalized.

“We come unto thee, Son of Faust, heir to Blake.”
They said in unison like a choral demon snake

“Create a fleshling worthy of a child, of many in one
So the deeds of your family’s sins can be undone.”

I stared at the figures with execrable bewilderment
Fearing my sanity had seeped through my temperament

They threaten my eternal existence with continued torment
A living anguish that would solidify my hell-bound descent

“What must be done?” I asked these surrogate advisers

And they instructed
A body made from flesh and metal
Of dead and living components
Blessed and cursed
From God and Satan
Men and creature
Using their collected powers
to merge with the night
I swept across the villages
and cities to obtain the materials
Now all these years, I’ve wondered
Why my medical expertise had been put to waste
“Did the demons prevent me?” I pondered
“Or did they aid me?” I concluded in my haste

Innocent or not, I claimed what I needed
To rid myself of the terrors deep-seated.

A steel-woven chest piece
and half-incinerated cadaver
Twenty feet of large intestines;
boys, girls didn’t matter

Shelled-out cranial cavity
with cerebral cortex to match
Mixing bladders and gallbladders
worth its catch

Punctured spleens and insolent creams
Circulatory, digestive, endocrine,

Iron bones, infused tendons mount
Smells and rancid odors spilling out

Guts, pus, worms and maggoty brains
Boiling in holy water with dried remains

Sacks of chain mail and velveteen potions
Seething concoctions conflate emotions

Patches of caustic skin made like adamant leather
Bolted with steel fingered brutally severed

Into gauntlet armor, this mechanized abomination
Personifying my sickened, wailing degradation

I showed Father and Mother my life’s work and creation
A flesh-iron shell waiting, they stood with appreciation

“Vespertine…” they called to the collage of my work
They petted its face while the shadows continued to lurk

Seventeen little fiends and creatures
appeared and surround
The moon shined through the glass
and the room around

The Seventeen shadow children became smoke and entered the monster
Now a being both ethereal and corporeal

My sins and demons locked in my own creation
Mother Mephistopheles and Father Selaphiel
Left Vespertine in my care

All that plagued me
All that haunted me

Personified, solidified
And barely alive.

My half-dead servant.

and Halloween child

Bruised.
Left and right, top and bottom,
Inside and out.

I survived that hellish tsunami of pain
that, flying like a 18-wheeler with cut brakes
on spiteful repeat
wrung my mind and emotions to alternating panic
and zombie-like numbness.

Funny how bruises blossom in different ways;
your betrayal, so deep, sends up saplings to sting me
at the most inopportune, unpredictable times.
I thought I was immune now,
Enough brushes against the anemone
sufficient tapering of the drugs of anger and regret
And I was sure,
sobbing alone,
in the bathtub,
  done.


.

Your heart is beating faster than falling rain
Then it hit my own like a moving train
And that was only the start
We learned about each other
With our souls undercover
And now we are lovers
Spring is seeping into the cold winter
Morphing into a hybrid sea
My fantasies are my reality
My realities are my fantasies
We'll drown in a world of vespertine

This lost world
Is where I want to be free
Inside of your little soul
Drowning so deep
This place
This is where I want to be
All night and day
Now, you can take the lead
I'll follow with a wondrous gaze

Growing sensations
From that tiny seed
That was planted without intention
Teach me how to fly
Make it feel like an addiction
It's time to stretch towards the sky
We'll make it seem like fiction

Bright cold silver moon
Staring into the scales - your nacreous eyes
You are my ******
I touch your hair ever so delicately
Why am I filled with torrid logy?
You are my narcotic, you
Unknowingly sew
the lids of my eyes closed
Cross-stitched phosphenes of your face
under my eyelids
I am overcome with a voracious thirst
to drink you, or the glass of moonshine
balanced precariously on your lips
Everything is better when my being
splinters, fractures, and crumbles into your lap
Moonshine, take us to the cosmos tonight

Mint spreading in elegance.
Some divine blanket of taste in the soft vert.
What meadows of limestone growing
tusks and a peppermint hair!
Verdent tastes of beaming echoes,
Bouncing off the walled caverns,
Body and soul.
Radiating vieled ripples.
The mountain's roots in caverns carved,
the speech of silent wind within,
inscribed on the hollow shell
of a white turtle from the deep lakes.
Waves form energy suppressing noise,
leaving keratin quiet.
Coral growing body soul,
maintaining vibrations of mossy
touch and taste.
Rhinestone tongue of night
Diamond sky.
A granite vineyard in the clouds, and
pitch shaped into a tower,
the glassy eyes of dawn and dusk.
Vespertine.
Translucent dreams.
Bamboo chins translucence,
Escalating moonstone shadows,
fingers spread in wide stretch,
ephemeral hollowness,
of everlasting happy spices.
Fingers locked in thin ligaments,
stones nestled in the crabgrass burrow,
moles' eggs in the nutmeg painting.
Luscious browning melange.
Quartz upon the wave-struck ridge.
Puffs of gray magical,
escaping cavern's entrance,
filling the air with
a fragrance uncompared
and bringing to the stomach,
a funny, fuzzy, filling feeling
called munchies!

*Written by: Simon and Lotus

Your eyes, golden brown
Soft, delicate fingers brushing a single curl
Against my cold face
"body heat helps frostbite,"
You tell me
And you lick your lips knowing
I am unconditionally doomed
In our paracosm you would be my wife
Bound by our losses and found by each other
In the unlit room, you're mine for just the hour
And maybe that's enough.

remember when the parabolas were to steep

and the martyr flew out of the sky to save us
all?

exposure to the curves bent us, but we stood still.

icy syncopation in our eardrums and no one could stop
our cadence.

we were cold and chilly, and our bodies began to flush out the

heat, but we stood firm. the wind whipped our eyelids,

and the river crashed into the trees.

our own metamorphosis was one of tyrannical thoughts

but purity lied between our veins. i stared at my hands for hours,

webbed and amphibian-like. we weren't ourselves

and after the fifth of March we fell into the vespertine.

transformation complete.
androgyny in its fullest form.

We were left alone
Without food
Without clothes.
It was dark
And all we could do
Was sleep on couches
That would squeak
And sag.

Cries from a rodent
Woke us all
The desperate anxious
Cries of a mammal
Trapped
Then silence.

The night rolled
On
With the vigour
Of a dragon
Silently
Only rising to
Invoke
Damage and terror
And steal treasure

Dawn came too softly
With a bang
But the day was
Only there to rest and think
As we marched forward
Towards the
Sevidical
Night.

so has been the comfort of the dial tone
where i hang my hopes as if i were
a body in the grass somewhere golden
i hang them on your voice as if your voice
       was something solid;
i am tethering everything to your voice,
with stubborn determination
your smile so aphrodisiac, the edges of your eyes
       speaking volumes
suggesting close intimacy so claustrophobic
to unite; the reocurrence is vespertine
and i ache! - for you are missing, missing,
gone from here,
     where you should be
and to anticipation i owe an ode for there is much
to be said about yearning, yearning
growing desperately impatient for the edge
of your neck somewhere close to my mouth
        where i so need it
to sing an ode to your body; electric in impulse
to spill, every yellow secret of mine, every shade
of blue and red and golden; yours to keep forever

i.
Your names
are a sudden
throb on
the tongue.

ii.
Your names
are a beachhead,
and the splitting
tide across it.

iii.
Your names
are diaries,
secret days
of ash and ink.

iv.
Your names
are the green
vocabularies
of the branches.

v.
Your names
are a shock
of gin in the
back of the throat.

vi.
Your names
are vespertine,
a soft song
in the evening.

vii.
Your names
are a corsage
of ether around
the wrist.

viii.
Your names
are an antidote
to the long,
long day.

ix.
Your names
are dreams,
mirages that
divide and rise.

x.
Your names
are the dark
brick fork
in my lane.

Vespertine shadows slowly encroach on the body of land that is me and you, us.
Forgetful people we get distracted by the green goblin we all trust- to soon.
Greedy child taking it all for yourself, you gullible thing, you immature thing, you human thing-

As hills erode, and small wrinkled trenches start to show in bright light, dandelions and forests start to grow faster and faster, louder and louder until it is the loudest. So proud of the way we made this- changed the mind of delicate dew drops, diving into the two sunken wells, they cry. The abundant land that is you and I is bigger than ever. The biggest ever.

The greatest to ever fall- falling down watch it claw at the edges of the world, you can hear the echoes call snapping of leaves, the forest burnt down, the green goblin you trusted betrayed you all the while you believed it. Now take it-
Look around. See the wrinkled face cave in, the body engulfed. From earth we rise, to earth we fall.

Pull! Back! Forth!
Hold it tight. Stroke it! Caress it!
Now go rough. Faster! Faster!
Come!
Ecstasy...
Breathe. In. Out. In. Out.

Now, this limp, oblong, hot
Piece of flesh
Dangles
Exhausted.
It oscillates. Like a bell. Clang. Clang.
Then. Slowly, recedes its purple head.

Passing excitement. That is why it’s done.
Boredom.
Loneliness.
That is why it’s needed.
To numb the thoughts. The angst.
With a flood of serotonin. And dopamine.

Vespertine
Pervert.
Every night and some days.
The natural little high.
The masculine common ground.
All things wise are merely a façade.

Again.
Pull it again.
Never let it stop.
The girl – you – were not a great enough
Distraction.