Mountaineers

Playing with 'castles and flames' for this week's Leeds Savage Club task:  
   

Climb to a mountain’s summit with me,

stop me with eyes across the burning dew,

perhaps we could build a castle here,

in the calm,

amongst swallows,

and skies of ice-blue:

let me smooth and dissipate

any raging tempests in you, and bring down the angels  

to set us a roof,

and we’ll see, my darling, we’ll see…

just as soon as you lay more than eyes

on me and push your fingers inside

my soul, fling out a sail

to stop the roll

of my savage and daily seas; catch my heart in your

hands, strike up the band, and start the dancing

through those clouds we hide our heads in,

waltz with me until the sunset is begging

us home,

to lie together,

and make sugared stars fall,

calling us forth to fell castle walls and strike

a match to light the moat on fire,

asking the moths to fly

our desire to a place it can do no harm,

a place where we only

slow each other’s hearts,

lie in arms, and float a world away;

come now, my love…

we have time enough…

let’s walk up our mountain today.

   

Damned

     

Come, you, bearer of light,

touch me, and eat me,

hold me tighter and feel me…

…gorge on me…

…and taste…

kiss me and chase all these ghosts away,

devour me and delve, pour your bad things in,

expel and fill up

this little

sin bin. Roll me in roses

and let the thorns tear, let the saints

and the angels stare,

like fire,

and the glowing stars,

the bricks of this castle

leave holy scars, whenever

we crash them down, and you and I

crawl on the ground in something

the others

call shame and dirt;

to us it is simply a courteous confession

of hard nights and tougher lessons

learned in gospel days,

and we scratch and beat, and caress

them away, however we please…or need…

and barely able to see or breathe past tongues,

and breath and pleasure and greed, we fall

to our unrepentant knees and pray one another, 

lay your hands, and your eyes,

on me, and have nothing to say:

let it rain, my demon,

lay down, 

be damned,

and stay:

we have sacred hearts…now sell me your soul…

what else would we do today?

    

Release

    

Come,

give me your day,

all your horror and your sweetness,

kiss me and rain them down my throat ‘til I am breathless,

talk with your tongue, and your eyes; no speech;

just draw with your fingers

all your crosses on me. Give me your thorns, and your

nails, and stay…nights are lone reasons for

battling in days, lie only

when the depth of your weakness

is almost too much

to stand,

slip your morning into my hand and

your afternoon

wherever you please,

rock me and hold me and let me tease all else

from your weary head, give me only your heart instead,

and with all your secrets

so silently told,

let me lay you down, my love,

and caress your soul like you have never felt,

let me melt your demons

and stroke them away, claw where all

the bad things would play, until they each come free

…and aching with blind

and writhing release…

you pour them, one by one, in 
to me. 

    

Flowers

      

“I would have sent you flowers today,”
you sighed, as we watched 
the autumn rain, both of us a distance away, 
and I wished you 
a sort of birthday of dreams. 
Little then did it ever seem, when you
dragged your fingers across my skin,
that you also stroked to life 
my sound-sleeping soul…until my window
dripped with molten gold and all 
those, beautiful reminders. 

Your voice on the line was the only remainder
of time we spent, long ago, 
with a lily, on a hill; 
when even with the best 
will in the world, the edges of the flower still 
rolled and curled, in the sepia of a memory past.
And you smiled down the wire and told me now  
cast off any woeful penchant I may hold,
for beside the dying lily, you said,
on the horizon, you had seen a rose.

I asked you if the rose was new,
and you shook your head and said the bloom had always 
been there: “it’s in your eyes,” you whispered, 
“in your touch, how you move, your hair…and I wanted
so to show it to you…but I did not dare;
for whilst we grieved the loss of the lily,
it was at the rose I
could not help but stare.”  

   

#Fridayflash - The Minotaur

    

Like the slow ooze of crude oil, it crept into his stomach; ice cold. Sat there, low and heavy, like he’d swallowed one of the sodden sand bags that had kept a primeval soup of leaves, cars, and the daily filth of other lives from his affluent, rural door in the floods last summer.

He welcomed back a reluctant friend in fear…shameful, most excruciating fear. The kind that warranted the clichéd cold sweat that soaked his collar. Rupert could feel himself start to shake, and tensed to avert the horror of it. Fine that he should be afraid…but that it should know him to be afraid? – Never!

All dripping yellow teeth and glowing eyes, it towered at him…an awful, yawning chasm in the corner of the rose garden, where it festered, and chased small things in torturous circles. Small things that could have been him.

Rupert had been told about things like this as a boy. The stuff of nightmares, that paralyses… The stuff that you never believed existed when your dad sat on the end of your bed at night and told you stories to make you afraid of the dark.

‘All boys should be afraid of something, son’…all boys had to live through fear, Rupert remembered. His Prep School headmaster had always agreed with his father when he said that…knarled old bastard…said it built a solid character. ‘Never trust a man who claims he isn’t afraid of something. He is dangerous, and a liar.’

Rupert could not lie, he had never felt less solid… His insides had putrefied to a thick liquid that he was certain was impending vomit. In the face of the beast before him, with its viscous claws exposed and flea-infested fur matted above a thrashing tail, he searched for any trace of the military focus his father had tried so desperately to breed into him by gene pool, by carrot, and by stick. 

As Theseus to the Minotaur, armed with a shovel and a ball of garden twine, Rupert prepared to do battle. Courage…he remembered, is facing that which terrifies you. Even if it is so terrible you can barely bring yourself to look…

As he swallowed rising bile and acid in his throat, a great warrior took the shovel from Rupert’s hand, and brought it swiftly and decisively down upon the Minotaur’s head. There was no sound…it jerked…once, twice…death throes, and fell still…bleeding from the ear. Rupert pursed his lips to contain the acrid liquid as he gagged and vomited into his mouth.

Sarah scooped the dead mouse onto the shovel and dropped it into the compost heap.

“Little bastard…”, she spat. “It was after my seeds”.  

   

Okay...maybe it's not quite 'horror' per say... ;)