Eros’s Skein


It was one of the last nights. I knew it was: when he first appeared. He came again, and I; I shudder before him. On my lips runs my tongue. Mouthing silently at why he tortures so: at why he returns; unable to move, I stare. It’s the wings. I have always been fascinated with them. His, absorb me: since the first time he came. Wings transparent. Eros. Eros boy-man: man-boy. Captivating in his prettiness. He allures me. His body glows. Divinely. He sparks. His embers radiate around him: around me. I turn and face him, thinking. You are enticement. You demand attention. I know that already, I am lost.

This night, your body is crafted to give pleasure. Turning slightly your wings rustle, like brittle paper wrapping. They have a bronzed sheen filled with leathery red veins. I wonder could I rub you. Rub against you. Could the seducted seduce the seductor? You move a step towards me, a statue that motions beckoning pleasure. You glisten provocatively. Casually, you shake your pretty wings. I recoil as you strike them open. They snap apart, erect: ready for flight. The back draft catches the stagnant air and your stench reeks through the room. Standing, I drop to my knees. You move forward another step and stand before me. You close them: enfolding my body.

After those nights, those days you stand and watch. I, but an empty shell sucked dry. You do nothing. You just stand. And watch. Body craves life. Craves meaning and definition. It cries, sobs and begs mind. Desires orgasmic release. Body is a beggar. Beggar follows. Crawling on knees, an animal sniffing and salivating over the trail of erratic breadcrumbs. A bridge you are Eros. You join but also separate. Weave your mental disorder. Body crawls along the dark path innately following the want, the must have. Body moves, a caterpillar inching painfully seeking the sweet torture you hold. Each miniscule morsel tasty; I glutted on your offerings. Mind a blank void, focused only on the moment. That moment. Those moments. Tempted. I liked his trappings. A sweet filling to spread over the vast empty plains that sit in darkness.

This boy. This man-boy, boy-man. Eros. He is a user. He needs me to wield his agenda. I am a user. I use him as a paintbrush to define and satisfy my creative lust for life: my desire to feel. He is but a plaything. I am the player. Play and win. Play and lose. Win and lose. Play anyway. A foreign blood you tease and exploit me. I exploit you. We are comrades in arms. Exploiters: parasitic of each other Eros. Roll your languid pleasure dice. I cede in your seeds of enthralling life. You embrace me. Penetrate me deeply. Welcome home: you say.

That night. That day. You said to me tonight is for the pleasure seekers. Erect you stood. Winding thoughts back, I am there; again. Your thoughts transmit, transmute within me. Tell me more. More. I feed hungrily on you. Your wretched stench pours into me. Seek it. Desire it. Grab it greedily. Before it dissipates like the fog that comes and goes. Gorge. While you can. Pleasure. Ah. . The mordant divinity.                                       Abandonment.                                      Hmm. . Feel it feed on your flesh, your mind: the skin you wear. It feeds and provides. Feel its nourishment. Drip with it. Writhe in its energising ectoplasm. Satiate yourself pleasure seeker. Love existence beyond self. Love on skin. Exist in it. Exist only for it. Only exist. Peel away the skin layer by layer. Slay and lay embroiled. Satiate in its hellish heaven, its heavenly hell. Tenderness wraps its illusory bony finger. One by one the skeletal fingers pierce wanton flesh. The player plays and is played. Passion rises, rides. Lust and mystery mount stealthily up and join the orgy. Cruelty, pain and misery trail in wait on its outer edges. Waiting. Abandon in surrender. Abandoned to pleasure. Lap it pleasure seeker.

Return. To that night. Look in the mirror. Is that me? Fury seeps bitterly. Rage gorges through blood and I lift the mirror from the wall. I am more than this empty shell that is cloaked in flesh. I hold the mirror over my head. I look up. Eyes monstrously luminous reflect blankness. I hurl the mirror against the wall: I am disassembled. Staggered the shards lie. Disarrayed. Fragments. I am a non-entity in pieces. Crudely taken apart, I lay ruined. In ruins: a writhing mass of nothing. A collection of. . . Don’t feel. Do feel. See in pieces. Saw pieces scattered. Shattered. Pieces manifest. Materialising, and become all within. Not without. But without. Within. A collection. Of nothing. Nothing is.

Eros looks on: then hangs his head. You spoiled me. And I let you do it. Your hand? Mine? Or both? A cruel bittersweet game you play Eros. The mirror lies before me. Just fragments. I walk over to the wall. Now, surrounded by myriads of distorted images. Defining outlines, reflecting more. Many images. In the darkened room, I look. I see. I wonder. Which is mine?

Tonight pleasure seeker, revel in my legend. Tonight is forever. Forever is the night: the day. The legend will always be. I am. You are. Gaze yourself in my gauze, graze on me. See. Watch yourself in the mirror. You are the mirror. Shards exemplify you. Piece-by-piece. See yourself pleasure seeker. Wounds of absence cast aside in my poultice, wrenching time and layer within my lair. I am Eros. Eros. Succumb. Bathe yourself in my depths. Finger the murky shadows. Boil in the passion promised. Explore. With your body inch mine in finite exploration and define me. Define you. You me. Drip over me your promised depths and find mine.

Seeker I exploit your desire. I am just. Just am. Wrestle in your fetters. Tear them from you. Claw at your flesh for release or submit and allow these manacles to pin you to me in your fetish desire. You want this. I taste it on you. Feel my tongue lapping your saccharine sweetness. I trail it across you. Lick by delicious lick. Feel my intent. Kiss butterfly soft to wanton hardness. I want to thrust my way into you. Rip into you, into me. This is part of you. Die in me. Become not an occasional guest. Grasp and feel. Corrupt yourself. Let me become a womb. Let me birth you and you me.

Eros boy-man, man-boy: passion you promise. Promise is nothing. Promise is empty. You are not tangible. Your taste is dulcet but that which you promise dissipates into nothingness. You are didactic. What follows? See. It all has end. It is not eternal. It is but a wraith that escorts to torment. What you give is not yours to give. You lie. Do you see them? They are bristling walking moralists. None of you know. You are all but voyeurs. Abstract maxims individually constructed to pour acid corruption on the road to perdition. I see you pretty man-boy, boy-man. I desire. I deplore and desire you even more. Yet what remains but nothingness? You are just a tease that pricks me. Excites me into your lair. You lie. I lie in you and you in me. Your promise is chased and desired but falls, discarded by the wayside.

Sacrificial pretty lamb, you are but flesh. Use your blood red lips to tease me into you. Thoughts create image. See them. Feel their rampant pornographic hold. They hold all. All desire. Flesh devours it. Flesh was made for sharing it. It will always infest and feed on you. A thorn pricks you. Consummate your taboo. Step over your desirous tantalising self-imposed line drawn. Experience pleasure of deep fulfilling exotic torture that sucks flesh away. I give life beyond life. I am the meaning. Share in me. Taste me. I am it all. Harvest it. Envisage the invitation. Let it taunt you. Mouth the words: lick the words and plunge into the promise. Define your thoughts: define the image. Give it flesh. Thrust it into your devoured flesh of want. Strip it naked and expose your barren emotion into my polarity. Suck hard on me and swallow my dark labyrinth.

Labyrinth of mirrors is what you define Eros. Wending their shards in abstract circles. See the monster images. Fragments. Everywhere. The labyrinth you offer is nothing but death and a way into the chaos line. Death chimes the end of that chaos line. This will be one of the last nights. I am no legend and neither are you. You delude yourself. We are but time’s servant. Yet time is my servant for I hold the present past and future within me. Unfurl your wings Eros, for you are but a liar. A lair. You offer trappings that rip and destroy in your wake. Shake your wings. Let me see the copper red veins that define your span. You are an empty shell that feeds on me. You have spent me. He stared at me with luminous meteor eyes. I saw his wilderness. He was not pleased.

I see him. Eros. The pretty man-boy, boy-man. He raises his head in defiance. Thoughts tendril, salvaging me from the ravaged depths he has plundered, that I plundered. Eros you are a desert whore of passion tearing, ripping and clawing your poisonous anointment, the substance of life. You infect everything with your innocuous needling. An arduous lover you are. Dedicated defiled you rattle your umbilical thread. You sliver your shards into all. A crowned demon with your immoral immortal distress. Such promise. Such despair. An enigma, you unite in your cool roaming evil. You trap all. Is none resilient to your charms? You are hell. You are heaven. We are your servants and you ours.

I grasp the scabbard and long to plunge into your flame. Would it quench you? I play with the length. Running my fingers tentatively up and down the long shaft of the blade. It cuts me. I hold it aloft then bring it down: pointing at him. You fired me. You penetrated and left me blackened. Your life juices through me, but it is bitter sweet. Could I scar you, the way you have me? You are a harbour spread, offering shade from the harsh sea. Within you all struggle. See their war? Your sea becomes a temple becomes a battlefield. All who enter become lanterns unlit and the slaughter continues. You are an ornamental struggle. I seek your shelter. I pledge myself to the depths of your womb embrace. Obscure me. I am a demon enchanted. I capitulate. I am thwarted and battle weary. Terror has fled and you possess me. You were a wraith. You did not exist. You were just a word. A distorted word, an image chased and revered but never believed. Why show yourself to me after all this time? You are victorious. But you are a liar. You give nothing yet take all. You suck hope with embroidered spokes of lightning. You are a demon fragranced. You promise divinity and enticement, spewing out charred ruins.

I shelter in your shadows battle weary. You overwhelmed me. You preyed. I prayed. You transformed and left ridicule. You scorn me with your naked bony claws. I see through your veil. You do not sculpt me. I taste your bitterness. I feel your arousal like pitched pain. On my skin you etch a broken dawn of cold seashore scorched with the burned out fires of night. Shattered I lie against your foundations. You do not rule. You do not have the power. You can infest but you cannot rule the flesh. You just taunt your promise. I sit between worlds. A no man’s land.

You infested me. You tasted and spat me out. Oblivious to your effect you remain controlled and defined by intent purpose. Shout or whisper your secrets. Show me. See me. Leaden. Now clustered worms of what was wanted scar me. You launched your death attack, spearing me with your arrows and left me. My blood seeps into the growing pool on the battlefield. You thrust out my emaciated flesh: my ravaged remains. Do with me what you will. I hold out the sword, waiting for him to take it from me. He remains motionless. I let the sword drop from my hands. I gaze around. All is the same. But all has changed. Night stalks through the flimsy curtains. I am no longer a sleeper. I watch the night as day spurns the darkness. Dawn rays split the sky butchering the blackness. I want to sleep, but it does not come. I sit up smoothing out tangled sheets. I see him standing in the corner. I lie back down. Go away, I tell him. Submerge yourself again, you tell me. I am not devastation. I blaze a cloud: a rage: a torrent of life, of hope. I am the way. I turn away.

I turn back and look at him. He stares back. The sword lies at my side. My thoughts reach him and I see him wince. You are an infliction that spawns and redefines the edges. You rise and swallow. You devour and demand sacrifice. You are but a transgressor in which all perish, within indulged dreaming of what could be. Yet who attains your promised dream? You mould with your rotting embers and lurk masking truth by wrappings of skin iced with preserved beauty. But your nakedness ages and pricks heavy: sloughing heart’s blood in abandonment and misery. You are the stealthy night lover who holds hostage the promised land of happiness; that is, but, an illusion always out of grasp.

Eros have you ever wondered at yourself. Your name. Letter by letter tumble it, muddle it, change it and you become sore. You saw with your bony promise and your teeth like razors that poison with each bite. You muddy and defile. You break the spirit like a stalk of straw with your spidery soul that has a scorpion sting. Your presence is a mythical thief. You portion your power and lance providing pure death. Plough. Punt. Mark your line. Your dynasty. You lie. Your surface is just a mirror reflecting desire. Beyond that surface you are but wooden fillings: a crafted timber bastion that captures by prostitution. Promising healing: dealing plague. I was enchanted with your slake: your rasping thirst upon my skin. But you: you snake tenuous connections. Your contours splinter and your margins cobble views of cold staggered sight: creating solidity of crushing tides. You skein your ripples, materialising within hidden depths, and trawl still a keen fisherman.

Always zealous, your eyes dart: stirring into another night day, day night. Sediment settled you stir like granules and wait for what surfaces from the abyss. You mould me, into a mermaid temptress, aloft a craggy rock face. Desired: but just watched from afar. Yet you see not the waters that I slowly boil and torment: till they are calmed to glass. Waters become a solid indigo. Who wants to tread miles of hostile oceans? There is no-one brave enough. There is none that like promise that beguiles. They watch. They enjoy the view. And they all slink back: into the abyss you stir. You are but a holographic conjecture. A spectre of illusional reality. Conjured energy. You conglomerate coloured confusion melting fragmented images, blurring all.

You are a womb birthing promise of death. You birth a fiery dragon with a demon grip: stripping and modelling a hell of creation and whoredom. Nothing but lamentation and suppliant bondage remains in your wake. The enchantress promised deliverance trials and trails: into emptiness. A weight it becomes: weeping idle dripped tears. Unclean you are, polluting and spreading banishment: shedding peril unsought. Going undetected, unchecked. Punishing inquiry of your insoluble mystery. Tainting and afflicting, you smelt a riven heart. Riven heart drives driven. It savoured and wanted. It desired so much. Driven heart births agonies; becoming barren. I listen. Wild fire rattles to the sound of bronzed armour battles. Battle. Agony. Crushed. Slayed. Dense lies the blood that dripped into the pools, on the battlefield. The sky reflects its crimson channel. I am abhorred. I was whored to you.

Eros pretty boy-man, man-boy: release me. You are an assassin. I declare you revel in the sacrifice I gave to seek your shelter. Curse you. You murdered me. I am shamed; bound by blood, which still falls. Harvest me, you prophet. Use your incarnate eye and see my heart profess and tend to devoted secrets that I refuse to utter. I perish as a stone of nothing. You bleed me arid within your bed. Your wrath devours my internal feast. Your mouth taunts with profane wisdom, which I will never comprehend. You are stealthy. You are silent, as you creep through. The wickedness of want was my deep damnation that darkened life. I hail the truth of the quest. I am a riddled harlot of your creation. I am but ruins. Take me home. You pollute my ignorance. I seek impunity. You have punished me enough.

Do you want me to say you are a legend? I know nothing. I understand less. I grope my way blind through a passage of thought. I seek a lit lantern to scrutinise. I am but an intrigued fool feeding on your illusion. The beast. I am enshrined within my skin, my life. Future is no proclamation but is enshrouded in storms of snow. Is meaning mistaken for purpose or purpose as meaning? Am I nothing but a faulty design condemned to rot at your foundation, which has become but a prison fortress of all that cannot be mine? You forbid an open door. Reason became absolved and a vile seductor you allowed to walk away from your tomb. What is the difference? You ensnare me for my cares, because I feel? You consort with me. You misled me. I endure you: but I will seize the chance to escape your stigma. It is my choice. I am a primeval sprite. A wisp still resides within me. You cannot suck that from me. Escort me to the forbidden door. Do not pinion me or evade the truth of your own spell.

Mr Legend you are destroyed. Eros you are a supreme prize; that I weep foul tears for. You fixate my passion. I am slain. I am your prisoner. Your bastion is nothing but an abattoir. The meat hangs within you. And you, you devour and suck at the bloodied victims greedily. My death cries; soiled into your harvest. Reap it. Rape it. Taste my haemorrhaging tears. Your poison is your undoing. Cascading oracles I speak, of a half lived life. My heart you splintered with your arduous barbs. Insensate. Borne of promise. Drawn away, from the seductor. Now I crest. Created within your illusion. I lift my battered body. I stand. I know. It would be one of the last nights.

On the last night: a promise of an inescapable future lures and strips. Binds my soul. I am corrupt. I am shamed. Fouled: with remains uncleaned. Desires: cling to me demanding, like wandering waifs of grief within my squalid heart. Silenced: by forbidden ground: shaded in your vagrant promise. Life is lived. Exiled by bitter rejection of truth. Fired: by foulest endurance. Drip wine berries of bloody enticement; I see you create a sea of blood, flouting life. Counsel man with assurance of your quest. Cast against your buried truth. Time awakes: wheeling a thunderous path into your nothing.

It becomes. Forsaken writhe in your torment unheard. I rest in your silence. Unheard. You know not what you do. They know not what they do. I know. Now. Ocean chasm you are. Wash your miserable unstoppable waves and continue the illusion you are. You are believed. You are unstoppable. I am drowned. I am folded lifeless. Eroded by sand stoning water, washing the evidence. Diluted and then eradicated. Dissolve my body. Reclaim it into your lying depths. Ice me bronzed from a molten mould.

This was the last night. Isolated night. Moonless night. Dark. Final. Almost silent. Almost. My breath leaks from my mouth, just ajar, in a slight hiss. The sounds of my thoughts shout to be heard, coalescing and reaching across the room to him. He stands there. Silently. Watching. Watching me. Watching him. Watching me watching him. It was but another night. It would be the last isolated and futile night. I would obliterate it. I had to. Whispers echo. Whispers promise. I want so much to breath in promise. Let him escort and exalt me into the promise of his oblivion. But already I know: I am within the perdition of oblivion. It can promise me no more. He is but an image of empty promise. Nothingness enfolds me; within its death breathe. Whisperings lie in arrangements of concocted escape. In the gloominess of the room I lie. Naked.

Eros man-boy, boy man, he moves. He stands resplendent. He beckons. But I do not trust him anymore. He lies. I see him. I know all that was not seen. I know all there will be. The tomb of his abyss has drained me. Emptiness. Pervades. Darkness. Darkness enfolds me. That darkness. Darkness: my old friend. Hello. Welcome me home. Bled, my carcass has been picked by the vagaries of life’s reality. Mind mattered. Once. Promise mattered. Once. Like the mirror they shattered all too easily. Naked the carcass lies. It reflects in the mirror shards. Vulnerable. The carcass rises. Becomes a body. Mind quietens. Whispered words. Nothing matters. Not one thing.

Despair writhes kisses across my skin. Lapping its foul tongue. In his dark cloak, he stands towering over me and bends over to tease my body: wanting to wrap me in his submissive despair. I writhe within his salivating and wreathing nightmare. I close my eyes. I reach for the sword. I thrust him away. Eyes open, I focus. Eros is surrounded by shards of smashed mirror. He takes a step towards me. Glass grinds under his feet. He is an enigma. Slowly I shake my head, from side to side. I look at his decadent eyes. I feel myself sucked back into the shell lying on the bed.

Eros beat his transparent wings. Monster eyes were luminous within the depths of that night. He took another step. Closer. And stopped. Holding out his hand. He watches me. Waits, for my reaction. I lay supine, on the bed. Disarrayed: bedclothes. Again, I shake my head: whispering goodbye. I watch as he dissipates into the nothingness of night. I stare at mirror shards lying on the floor. Images reflect in that night. I wonder. Which one is me?