“You’ll have to leave sometime.”
he murmurs into the fossil of your spine,
soft divine scatterings littering your cosy burrow home
in the soft lime light from above.
His pebble fingers tracing the bow of your lips,
as you close blissful eyes
and curl into his devil shape.
“Not yet,” you whisper in return “it’s too late,
now, to go back.”
“They’ll be waiting.”
he nudges you, later,
as you lie in tender arms,
smiling in the dying shadow of Mephistopheles’ charms.
No alarm bells – there are no sirens
here. “It’ll do no harm,” you shake your head
ruefully, “to stay here for a while.”
“How long?” he cannot hide the hope.
The jagged slope leading up, back,
home, is somehow sprinkled with fear. “Say…
a year?”
“Really?”
suddenly he is all energy,
boundless hope, excitement, joy.
Sweet boy. “Really.” you promise,
a smile in your eyes. He believes your lies.
Because, really, how can you stay?
This is bliss, this personal hell,
this grey area, where daylight
is green from the grass above your head
and you live your own way
among the vivacity of the dead.
But it can’t last.
You are the sensible one,
the practical, think-things-through, serious one,
but as time goes on
and he loves you more and more and more
as you come to see happiness, always, as green,
as darkness, to you dances that thin line
between routine and new.
As you become at home in grey,
begin to dread the day,
begin to pray – not for salvation,
but for security – you can’t help yourself.
You begin to wonder.
What if?
And one day, when his adoring fingers
are plaiting with lovely doting care
into your maiden’s hair, and his lips are sighing
kisses on your heart, you crack.
Of course you can’t leave. Of course you can’t.
Because…
you love him.
That’s all it takes.
Suddenly, you’re on your feet, anxious
desperate now. You’re incomplete
alone, but with him…
somehow, he makes you, you.
He’s panicking, wondering what’s wrong.
You’re frantic, needy, happy.
You’ll work it out,
somehow you’ll stay. You’ll find a way,
even if it kills you.
And you do.
The forbidden fruit –
as old as time itself, or at least as old as woman.
Pouring through books you find a clause:
she who eats of Hades’ fruit
that’s it, the loot. The golden treasure –
all you have to do is
pluck
and you’re his.
One. Two. Three. Four.
More. You need more.
But before your definite tender hands
can touch that fifth seed to your lips,
the gates of your own personal hell
are flung wide, you see the sky, cringe away.
The green light of day is swallowed up,
that rugged slope thrown into light,
hell opened up
and you’re dragged back up into the mortal world.
Painful eyes open to reveal your mother,
desperate, caring, best interests at heart
in a haven of sickly green living mockery.
You close them, tight, only to find him
burnt like a sepia negative into the open wound of your soul
and eight final pomegranate seeds
lying in his lifeless hands
like pebbles on the graves of the dead.
i love this!