give it up
instead of grabbing for decay
what we viewed as gold, i believe
pollutes this place
and its grace
ascending like a snake up your tree
up your happy ending
understanding
all you're supposed to be
[holiday work/social too busy for me to make any real commitment to RP at the moment, so availability will be really limited for the next few weeks. likely i'll pop in and out for occasional scenes with my close folks, but vox-ing and general attention to the RP space will be light. need anything from me? storyline questions regarding things you need to do in my absence? mail me. love you all.]
You are a waterfall
Waiting inside a well
You are a wrecking ball
Before the building fell
And every lightning rod
Has got to watch the storm cloud come
And I’ve heard of dirty fiends
But you don’t often hear
Of Us Ones in between
And I’ve heard of creatures
Who eat their babies;
And I wonder if they stop
To think about the taste.
I saw the sun go down
Outside of Arkansas;
And I saw the sun come up
Somewhere in Illinois.
And in the darkness
I taught myself to hate.
But where were you, oh, where were you?
And where the fuck did the sun go?
And I am a creature.
And I am surviving
And I want to be alone
But I want your body.
So when you eat me,
Mother and baby,
Oh baby, mother me,
Before you eat me.
And you should always pass
When you get the inside lane.
Don’t pull your hair out;
I won’t pull my hair out.
For I have never seen the sun
That did not bury his fears in the side of the world.
And the day is done.
You are a waterfall
Waiting inside a well
You are a wrecking ball
Before the building fell
And I will mutter like a lover
Who speaks in tongues, oh he speaks in tongues.
Oh I speak in tongues.
(She’s your mother; she’s got a lovely tongue.)
[sunset rubdown]
"You came," I remember him saying.
We never left, we said.
I can't remember what else happened, but Metatron broke the seal in my hand and I can't move my fingers. I'm still bleeding, I think. We are hanging from the Tree, the elements are disordered, but We are I am this is face down in bed, and Eurydice is with Us and she was not touched --
I should have killed him, but I could not. I could do not but try to worse-than-kill him, to create Nothingness, it was poor discipline, but We did, We opened a hole in the world.
We can't move. She can't move. Laudanum kills the pain and stills the agents, but no reversal was ever like this, and there are holes in me, I can feel the madness blowing its breath through the spaces, and I want, I want, I need to relinquish consciousness, but We can't.
We can hardly breathe, but she was not touched, and We never left --
Sometimes in my delusion, as my flesh is knitting up, I am being held. Mercedes is cradling me, with her arms around my neck, her arms around my neck and We can't breathe and then I hold Eury's hand in Thanatos', we hold the fuck on and we are all still here and still real and in Our own name, We are winning, and as long as I don't say things like goodbye Mercedes or Father forgive me or please or that's the end of that we'll be fine. We'll be fine.
There is blood in my mouth, and the flavor of it, somehow, keeps me from overdosing, and We stay awake, We come in and out, but We are here. In my sister's bed? On The Star's front porch? In a hotel with Phineas, and she's spelling words on my belly, drawing lines on my back? In a hospital, somewhere, yet again? In the front seat of Shannon's Jeep, blood in my mouth and salt in my eyes? Oh, save me, girl, save me -- no, no We don't need --
Come back inside, and my voice sounds like my father's, black soldier (do I call March?) on the back patio, and I'm running -- no, Metatron is running, and I'm calling him --
It's all the same, this is here, we are here, Eury, Eury, and because my lips can't move well, it sounds like the four-letter name of God and it sounds like I have you, Eurydice and God's kingdom both.
We will not let go. We will not go. We never left.
We never left.
.
--
You’ve got your hair down
I heard that you can kill things
You’ve got your hair down
I heard you’re killing armies now
So don’t let your head get too bigDon’t let your party go
I’m really not going to bed today
I’ve nothing else to do
But no one said I can’t put up a fight
That’s why she’s breathing like I’m holding a light
Well I say it's just smoke
So you say it's the hair of ghosts
So I say it's the white hair of Poseidon
Ebbing in the tide in some dead sea
So you say it's some Shroud of Turin
And the sun wore it white and the earth wore it thin
Or the sun wore it white and His faith wore it thin
Unraveling heavenward
It's saddled to tiny birds
Or other such winged things
Either way they are struggling
Either way they are miniature
Either way they're invisible
But either way they're confused
As Hell would have them
And the pattern of flight is chaotic and blind
But it's right cause chaos is yours and it's mine
And chaos is luck and like love and love blind
The pattern of flight is chaotic and blind
But it's right cause chaos is yours and chaos is mine mine mine mine
And chaos is love and they say love is blind
But they're subject to hating us
Oh, just like the rest of us
Oh, we're just like the rest of us
They need the rest of us to stay alive
So that's not where confusion lies
That's not where allusions to the fact that the truth is just smoke in your eyes
Does lie
Confusion lies in which other wicked things do lie with
Confusion lies in which other wicked things do lie with
And chaos is yours
And chaos is mine
And chaos is love and they say love is blind
So I say, oh I see now, it's just smoke
So I say
Oh, I see now
It's just smoke
"Somehow I knew you'd come back around, Daddy-O," says Mona Dahl, cocky on the curb outside her school, detaching from her posse for a more interesting opportunity. She's wearing blood-colored lipstick, dark, almost brown, and she wears the black mole on her upper lip like a devil's kiss.
And Mona doesn't ask questions; Mona, practiced moll in her long sweater, has just been waiting for today, and she gets in the front seat of the silver Mercedes Benz like she owns it. And Aden Brande, he just drives, lips twisted around his cigarette as if it were any day, any ordinary day.
"Whatever happened to Phineas?" Mona wants to know, and of course Aden doesn't answer her.
Mona hasn't seen his tattoo. Yet. Mona hasn't seen the pale, ghost-eyed madchild currently lying catatonic in Brande's empty bathtub, dreaming of red eyes and white crowns, white tangles, white arms. Mona doesn't know a damn thing besides that she ought to be in this car right now, and she's awful pleased with herself, and still, all the same, she says, at length: "You're a strange one, Aden Brande."
And Aden doesn't answer her.
"Can I call you Daddy, too?" says the little witch princess, who smokes cloves. Mona Dahl's hair is dyed blacker than she was born with, Mona wears black leggings and leg warmers and a leather jacket, and she's just about to turn eighteen, but she's been acting a lot older ever since she was a lot younger. She's good at this, the alchemist reflects, watching her curl her lips around the filter in what she thinks is a grown-up way.
Brande doesn't tell her no -- a word from the Dahl girl might just be any old word, troubled Mona, experimental Mona, difficult, grown-up Mona, who bullies all the other girls into schoolyard smoking demerits just so she doesn't have to sit in detention alone. But he doesn't say yes, not really, and instead he twists his lips, and Aden Brande blows acrid smoke and doesn't say anything. He's driving her back to his house, purposeful.
"But you like younger girls, don't you?" presses Mona, and she is young pretending to be old pretending to be young when she presses her knees together and does her clumsiest Angie Dickinson. She thinks she has got this one. Mona is good at pretending; her eyes are pitch-black, her fingernails are pitch-black, and she thinks she's in control just because Aden Brande has not said a word.
Hardly a word, rather. "That's not why I like you," he says, without explaining.
"Oh-kay, Daddy-O," says Mona, and she turns up the radio.
And in a little while, Mona Dahl learns that she is not so grown-up. That maybe, maybe she knows men, and knows how they are, and knows how to play this game, but --
"Oh, Daddy," she drawls, rumpled leggings and eyeliner smears, like the mask that covered a clumsy virgin is peeling, peeling away. In the waning light in a sparse bedroom, the plaid of Mona's school skirt could be any old color, snow-white, dove-gray, like transmuted ash at communion.
It shakes her to the core of her, and how sad to learn that she is not yet a woman in such a violent, vulnerable way. How painful to learn just how inadequate a vessel is the soul of a girl -- oh, her body can accomodate, she knows it can, and even through a dazed haze she knows the cradle of her hips is resilient. It's the soul, it cracks and swells, spills, overfills --
"Call my name," Brande says, like a growl muffled low into her sharp satsuma and feathered bergamot, and Mona whispers Aden as if she can't help it.
Later on, Mona cries a little bit, but it isn't because of how she aches, how stunned, how sore. It isn't because of regret, or because of sadness, or even because she's afraid of the way he's like a monster in low light.
"You do.. like me?" she suddenly whispers, clove-hoarse and juvenile in the dark, in one of those rare moments where she forgets to pose, to move practiced, to act like the woman she wishes she is. She cries because he has seen her, just now -- has always seen her, like so much translucent stocking, because he is the only one she hasn't fooled.
It's like being born again.
And Aden Brande still says nothing.
"You're... writing on my back?" says mascara-stained, pale-drained Mona, who feels him trace the shape of her with his fingertip like a lover, just like a lover.
"Something like that."
"What are you writing?"
"The future," he says, dazed, tracing ten circles and twenty-some little lines all along the rib-edged almond milk of cusp-child Mona Dahl's back, speckled with dark beauty marks like constellations.His touch leaves no impression, and when he has traced a meaningless pattern from the small of her back to the nape of her neck, he begins again.
"That's weird," sighs Mona. "You're a weird one."
She had been planning to tell, to tell everyone about Phineas' something, but even though she'll never let on -- even though she'll tangle petulantly in his sheets as if emulating the opera of the courtesan, and later threaten him, playfully, with the spectre of her wealthy parents -- even Mona Dahl will never, never say a word.
And Brande says nothing, either.
"Why did you pick me?" asks Mona, and she is almost timid, almost, even as she's so brave about pressing her hips, about holding parts of him, about tangling his legs in hers like a woman does.
There is no answer, until --
"Do me again, Aden Brande," says Mona, suddenly deciding she doesn't need his explanation, and she cannot state her needs in any way but coarsely. Bad little Mona has never known how.
"That's why," says the alchemist simply, as he obliges her, and by the way he kisses the little black star above her abraided lips, she can almost believe he's lying.
--
Something always takes the place
Of missing pieces
You can take
And put together
Even though
You know
There's something missing
The sun burned a hole in my roof
I can't seem to fix it
I hope the rain doesn't come
And wash me down the gutter
The air is picking up again. We saw Julien March entirely by chance (as if anything were by chance). When I first met him, I found him a devil. Of course, I know I stand apart from mankind, but I never felt kin to him, either. I think what I felt is superiority -- I am living on a Path that supersedes the one on which I was born, and he is living in exile, prisoned by humanity.
What does it mean now that I drew no such distinction?
I let him hold Eury. I thought of asking him about Dalton and if he'd seen Phineas, but that doesn't concern me any more -- still, it was hard not to think of it given that March knows my want, the way it is to gnash and ache like this, and easier to ask him about the plaid-skirt womanchildren than it was to ask him if he's seen my sister's shade. If he can speak to her, and when I think of the possibilities I become so distracted I can barely think straight, so that Eurydice cries out for no reason and she won't calm down until I do.
I don't know if it's sexual frustration. It's all the same, isn't it? Is that why I left Eury at home for the first time in order to see Shannon? I tell myself it's because of her curse, and unlacing a curse is the same as unlacing a seal, as unlocking Heaven's door, something for which we need practice, Eury and I.
And Eurydice rejected me. I'm just aching, achingly frustrated, nearly mad with it -- I ought to be ashamed of myself, if I were capable of shame. I need some other poor object, so as not to despoil my Eury. She's too fucking perfect. And especially now, I'm proud of her. If she can want something other than what I want (and I want, I want), then I'm doing this right.
Oh, I'm doing everything right. Just to look at her back, which We branded without even trying, with my Tree, my name. I could write whatever I wanted into her skin, I think, but how beautiful that is. Did she learn that while we were in Sicily? I began to think that was a fruitless trip, but now I'm not so sure.
We're still winning. All thirteen of us.
It's right to be home.
It’s cold
It’s dark
It’s not for people with uneasy hearts,
But if you’re with me on the other side
Strike up the band; we have survived.
Oh do they beat that drum to get you back home,
Or do they beat it to keep you away?
We walked away from a burning building and I took her to the shore. Eurydice, I mean.
And maybe it's because she looks so, so like my sister in the dark (or maybe it's that, god help me, Mercedes, I can't remember) -- or because she keeps calling Phineas' name, like she's an open box all full of my shame (no, I've no shame, the fucking weather's getting to me). Or maybe it's because babies learn the way of the world through folklore that I told Eurydice, my-my-mine and belonging to me more than to the world, I am her world -- that I told her another story.
There once was a Magician who never knew his mother, I began, and then --
There once was a Magician who loved someone --
There once was a boy and his beautiful sister, and it was summer --
And then I didn't know whether I was telling the story for Eurydice's benefit or for my own.
There once was a Magician who climbed to the top of a tall, tall tree, and from there, he found the view beautiful, and he and his sister sat in the branches just like birds -- remember, Eury, we were like birds today? And this Magician became the king of the world, all on his own.
This man slept deeply, and he had beautiful dreams. He stopped feeling pain in his body every minute of every day. It was like death, only it was better, because it was Divinity, and he never had to fear Nothingness again.
The Magician had never had a wife named Naomi Weiss, a traitorous bitch who got in his way and bore a doomed baby.
The Magician's soul belonged to himself, and only to himself.
He never bled in front of a woman named Shannon.
The Magician never loved a girl named Phineas Gage after some fifteen long years of loving no one and nothing. He no longer remembered her, because he slept with a lot, a lot of women and he didn't need to remember any of them, either.
He never forgot the face of his sister Mercedes, which let's pretend it looks just like pretty Eury's face, because Aden's Eury is a good, good girl.
And Mercedes wore orange flowers in her hair when her brother married her. And she'd never been sick and she never, ever died.
And Eury grew up to be a perfect, healthy young lady, because her creator was kinder to her than any unjust god would ever be.
And the Magician could write his own laws, he could rewrite the past and the future too, so that all the stories he told Eury were true just because he said them.
I don't know why I'm taking Eury back to the place I met Persephone. Then again, I don't know why I do anything, anymore.
More and more I feel that Eury's not right -- she says strange things, she will not separate from me. Like I broke the yolk on its way out of the egg, like I wrote a letter to my future and signed it, but the envelope's still open. She's plaintive; pulls my hair and clothes, looks stark, crushes her body up against mine as hard as she can as if she were trying to get back inside my skin. As if she didn't know she had a body of her own.
To be quite honest, it's making me ill. Not Eury herself -- in fact, she's so goddamn adorable that the Ten (all right, and I) want her every second of every day. I don't worry about that much, because I went through it a little with Persephone at first, and it faded. What unsettles me is the idea that she's inviable. Horror novels have been written about the failures of alchemists. They were the stuff of Mercedes' bedtime stories.
I thought that I'd go to Italy with Phin in the winter.
So maybe it salves me, somewhat, that at least something is still the same as a decade ago -- the transatlantic flight at night, the cold of the cabin, the shift of the hours back into compressing twilight, into a twelve-hour night, as if the sun's chariot is always just a step ahead.. Eury became afraid on the plane, as if, of all things, she doesn't like the dark. Tried feeding her laudanum from my fingers, and she licked my palm like an animal, much to the chagrin of the stewardess, but it didn't do very much to her. Finally I just had Mab put her to bed, because it was about the only thing I could have done that wouldn't have affected the flight.
She slept in my lap, with her eyes open, of course. I put a blanket over her bare legs even though I knew she couldn't feel the cold -- I am, I'm addled, I'm aging, even with that hard little red stone heart of mine (are you still wearing it, Phina?)
And I feel a crawling dread, a dark, engine-whining resignation. We are inside the hollow guts of a metal bird (we know a bird) and there is nothing but black all around, outside of, her and I. And although airplanes are built not to crumble, to peel and flake apart in the air, to dive toward the glittering ocean in parts that turn to dust -- it's not like it doesn't happen.
If you've built it badly. If you've done it wrong.
Eury stares at nothing, and sometimes she trembles, and I have done all of this long enough to have learned not to spare my energy on worry, but I've never been so conflicted to see the end of a path in sight.
I will have time to damn and burn everything behind me later, everything except what matters, but right now, the air is too rare in here, I am too tired, and this maid-child I made never looked so soft and so sweet, as if by her moon-whiteness, she were punishing me. I can still taste her red blood.
Rest assured that in my jacket pocket as we speak is also my own list of how to distribute my belongings, to dispose of my remains.
I will crawl
Right back to you
Under swollen summer sky,
I’ll be there soon
My heart is clean
Like a cratered moon
And the sea
Of darkling mood
And I’ll be true
True to you
We may consume ourselves, but then I don’t think twice
We’ll be there soon
Soon
RK --
It sounds like you're well. I'm glad.
I don't know what I can say right now. I'm suffering working a lot. It's hard good, but pretty all-consuming.
I decided to take Eury to go with the new maid to Italy for research. I can't tell if she's successful healthy. Do you remember my aunt Luciana? Well; Mercedes' aunt, technically, Marius' mother. She's been in a nunnery in Sicily for a while, so we may visit her.
I miss my sister, Ray. I've spent more years of my life without her than with her, and sometimes I can hardly remember her face my childhood any more. That was a world away -- if you understand the Sefirot, you'll know I mean literally.But lately I've dreamed of her a bit more -- I don't know whether it means I need to stay motivated, or that I'm going to die win be done soon, or that I'm going mad.
Yes, don't laugh, I know I've always been a little mad. You wouldn't have had to have broken so many noses for me when we were brat kids otherwise.
And missing Mercedes is even harder now that P
I'll talk to you when I get back.
Hey, no matter what, remember that I
Fidelis,
AMB
