There are rooms only a few are allowed to enter. I leave the door cracked for the dark.
where the light arrives late
Joined March 2021
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The Queen of the Ruined Moon
She stands where the saints used to watch,
her crown of cold iron upon a head no name remembers,
holding a staff of blacksmith's grief
that weeps blue light like a well that will not dry.
The stained glass is broken, but the moon still
pours through the holes like milk through a cracked spoon,
and the embers of a thousand tallow candles
float up from the floor and hover, patient, like the dead.
Her cloak is crimson, tattered to a whisper,
each rip a year she did not spend in the dark alone.
The mist gathers at her hem and lifts to meet
the crystal's drip, and for a moment she is the whole sky
and the whole ruin, and the moon is her face
and her face is the ruin, and neither blinks.
Come, little candle, come and light
the words the ruins would rather keep:
I am not the queen of this place,
this place is the queen of me,
and the moon has decided, at last,
that it is finished with being
only a light,
and wants, instead,
to be a door.
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It starts as a whisper
behind the teeth,
a word pretending
to be small.
You say it like a warning.
It answers like a dare
soft at the edges,
sharp where it counts.
It lives in the pause
after *shouldn't*,
in the hand that stays
one second past
the reason for it.
Naughty is the name
we give the wanting
when we still want
to be caught.
It doesn't roar.
It leans in.
It waits to see
how far you'll let it go.
#DarkSouls #Naughty
Michelle retweeted
The night Heaven sent an angel to retrieve her, the Devil was holding her as though she were the last beautiful thing left in creation.
The garden lay beneath the ruins of an ancient kingdom. White flowers trembled in a wind that smelled of rain and forgotten prayers.
She stood between two immortals.
One had black wings and horns, and eyes that had frightened kings for ten thousand years.
The other was an angel, radiant and untouched by suffering.
"Come with me, Elara," the angel said. "Your place is among the living. He has no right to keep you."
But she noticed something the angel didn't.
The Devil was trembling.
Malachar. The demon who had brought seven kingdoms to their knees. The one Heaven itself feared.
He could barely look at her.
"Tell him," he whispered.
"Tell him what?"
"That I never asked you to stay."
His voice broke.
"I gave you a thousand chances to leave. Every night, I unlocked the gates. Every morning, I waited to find you gone. Because I knew that if you stayed, you would discover what I truly am."
She touched his cheek.
"I discovered that long ago."
"Then why are you still here?"
"Because you were the first creature who could have possessed me, and never once asked me to belong to you."
The angel lowered his hand.
He had come for a prisoner.
He found a woman making her own choice.
But Heaven had one last cruelty.
If she stayed, the Devil would become mortal. His power, his immortality, everything that made him feared, gone.
Malachar looked at her and smiled, softly, sadly.
"Perhaps I could finally learn what it means to have only one lifetime."
She kissed his forehead.
"Then let's make it worth living."
And for the first time in ten thousand years, the Devil looked forward to growing old.
—
Some of us don't want to be saved.
We don't want to be owned.
We want the door left unlocked, and someone who still stays because they choose to. 🖤
I still light the candle.
Not for him.
I'd have to know
where he was
to mean it that way.
There's a kind of love
that turns into a practice.
The knees get sore
before the heart does.
The hands fold
until they forget
what they were holding.
That's the spiritual part.
Nobody warns you
a ritual outlives its god.
The words still work.
The mouth still knows them.
The hour still gets kept.
People call that faith.
I've been at it too long
to be that generous.
Faith expects something.
I keep the hour
the way a dog keeps a house
not loyalty,
habit
that learned to call itself
loyalty.
He may come back.
Somewhere in the third year
I lost the ability to tell
whether I want that.
Tonight I lit the candle
because it's dark,
because I'm here
and there's a part of me
still thinks those two facts
add up to an answer.
He loves me, he loves me not
I fold a leaf and let it drop.
Some hearts are yes and some are no;
the yes is not a promise, only hope.
He loves me, he loves me not
the leaf goes drifting past the pane.
I ask the wind, the wind only whistles,
I ask the sky, the sky stays the same.
Some loves are loud, some loves are thin,
some loves are weather brief, then gone.
The wind goes one way, then the other,
and the leaf goes whichever way it's drawn.
He loves me, he loves me not
I fold the leaf and keep the fold,
and set it in my coat with the rest
of the ones I would not hold.
He loves me, he loves me not
the pane is dark, the sky is the same.
I fold the day and start it again,
and ask it soft, and slow, and small
not for the answer.
For the space
between.
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