Sam Ledger-

Sealings
A voice becomes hoarse from swallowing gravel in efforts to scour an abrasive taste of words. I do not wish to write of you anymore, for I am tired of living in the shadowy glacial chill of a corpse.

Mourners should have left you to scolding June air. Where feasting infants beating wings could have gorged sustenance from your spleen. Or become intoxicated on your swollen liver. Or worse. No one needs a lesson in patriarchal biology.

My utterance transcends unto this,
a state of silence. You inhabit a pill box casket of ash and littered bone, nameless through expressions of a faceless man. Fingers have beaten stakes of refusal. Of disinclination to acknowledge billowing gusts of air wasted in your efforts to enrapture my soul between your cupped hands.

Love is loveless when defiantly taken and I will, if I must, steal back time and body and blood
 

Sugar Skull & Death Masks
I never cared to lay in sunlight, alone and exposed to rays. Never crept above deck but to bathe in violet light of the moon. He walked forward in his death mask as I held my sugar skull in symbolism of matrimony. Fingers fall to mastectomy scars wrapped beneath mottled rags. Their removal never did serve the purpose intended. I am still, standing, delinquent, muted by  a singular stitch in my lips.

Roses &  velvet & lace knitted together by seventeen pairs of hands and sixteen pairs of eyes. Veils dipped in reddening dye. Eyes hidden by puckered skin, drying since removed from its head.

Heathen voices call out mockingly as we waltz along our dusty aisle. I had been agile in my youth, now stiff with lethargy and melancholia. Vocality stifled in a malformed vocal box. I have not sung aloud in the catacombs when walking alone since I was a child. I have not walked alone since a sun set upon a distant shore. Our witnesses remain static, impaled where they stand, evidencing two shadows merging under a bitter testament.

Until death shall part us
To dishonour and obey

Two corpses laid shrouded in their marble sarcophagus. Silent but for hushed sounds of laboured breathing. I am birthing his fantasy under a weight of virginal lace and taffeta. Wrapped in tissue paper a list of lies I told...

I love you.

Mourners do not weep amongst themselves, fall to knees begging the Almighty for why.  He, He lays next to me, stoic, solid, clasping a frail hand in his. Faithful. To keep safe, to keep silent. The blind are leading the blinded. My lips have turned blue and the sex of humanity leaks from my mouth.

Stigma did not manifest as I imagined.  In spite of my bringing my own nails and handing him the hammer. Sweet kisses touched my eyelids and words stung as sung in baritone vibrations. There is no salvation for sinners
Nor penance. Not redemption.

I say Revelations lied, he laughs steadily. Deafening tone echoing mockingly from stone walls and lid. An airtight grave does not whistle with wind, rain may not seep into my bones, but I sense a sentiment of suffocation setting in. He smiles again and says something I cannot hear. His teeth are missing, his teeth are missing as the last note of morning passages is played on a piano. Low notes drifting down or up or across, I have lost a sense of space and time move back and sideways and from itself.