Author: Hari Navarro

I’d ask you to look at me, but I know now that you can not.

Will not.

How I too shielded my eyes from you.

King.

No, Devil — wrought within the arching serpents of molten plasma that leap and dive upon your very own crackling sphere of fire in the vast far flung out there nothing.

How special I thought you were.
How special you thought you were.

You’re gone but still your solar dynasty and its ancient moribund echo mists over the hurt that you layered upon my mortal ray-licked flesh.

But know this —

The flames eat and scratch at you far more than they ever did me. I hear your snigger, but it is true.

Listen, just listen.

I did love you so.
Can you see me?

Can you see through the broken veil of my hymen submission into the atrium of my likewise ruined core?

You came down. Stepped off of the stars and your feet gently swelled as they tasted of our earth.

You found me and you played me. You touched me and your fingertips drew back as if you would break me.

I thought that was affection but it was fear — fear of damaging a favoured chattel.

I had never known what it was that I wanted.
I had never thought of myself as weak. You gave me that.

You gave me all of that nothing that.

But now you have gone and my mind swirls around the cartographers lines and it inches up any and all of the mountains that lay ahead.

You gave me something. Or, I took it at least… I do not fucking know.

I am not afraid.
I can traverse any height as I know all peaks eventually fall and bend down unto the sea.

Right?

I sense you now only in the glare of the midday heat. But like the flower of the sun you shy away as I try to speak.

To reason.
To something.

As you spread and glint upon the sea I look at the cursive waves and their foam tongues at the holes in my body. I so wish I was fresh as flowers given upon death — before they fade to pulp.

I did not ask for this.
This alien thing you gave. This thing that befriended me.

Coddled me.
Raped me.

You came into my bed. Like an uninvited God into a married woman’s womb and you took that which was never once offered.

I tried to resist.
I did.

I hit you with fists bound and laced with glass and your laughter it shattered in my head.

I’ve wished for this time. This time when you have left this place and I only sometimes hear whispers of the things that you did.

And, so I chew on the gristle of your residual fear. I tell myself you are only now in my head and I think I am right.

I have you caged and I am the owner of the key.

Am I stronger than you?

Will you ever even remember me? Will you remember the oh so trivial mistake you made?

You are a King, beneath a crown spiked in the most fathomless blades of energy and I am but a girl alone on a gently turning wheel — talk to me.

You are blind.
You cannot see what you have done. Your violations are but a creaking joint in your neck.

I feel you are a Viking craft set adrift — full of smouldering mythology but slave only to the push and pull of the tides.

Answerable to nothing. No one.

I have not a single further ounce of love for you. The fact that I ever did leaves tar on my lips.

I wish I was like you and could flare through clouds but all I see is ever-freezing waterfalls.

I feel you still as you rope my legs and pull me off of the road. The road that leads to the beach with the bridge and the dunes with the bones and the bunker.

I am not stronger than you. I am not.

But I am better.