a collection of completely legitimate poems

Icarus

Flame

She would rather go this way, dissolved by the flames, a force of nature. Something with no bias towards her, no motive besides the path it was to burn. To the fire, Ella was not an enemy, she was an obstacle.

She had taken this stance after years of facing death. Maybe the third or fourth time somebody held a knife to her neck, a gun to her head, or a bounty to her name, Ella was finally worn under the desperate eyes and shaking hands of her attackers. They were people like her, treading on shedded morals along a beaten path; the path to glory, revenge, power, or some other intoxicating reward. These realizations softened Ella in a bad place, a place that any weathered hero knew to keep calloused and blind; an underbelly of empathy. A good place for somebody to puncture.

The knowledge that she, hailed as a hero, had stepped on as many people as Danielle on an ever stretching path to survival, opened a welt that hurt a thousand times more than a slow death by fire: regret. 

Ella

I come up to the cliff. The decision. But is it, really?

I let myself fall.

The fire welcomes me with open arms and I am devoured. I am a wick and I have burnt myself to the bone, so I hardly feel the tongues of white fire seducing me, guiding me to the rest I so dearly crave. My vision is blotted out, but the last thing I capture is a slow fall back, my hair alighting, my hands outstretched, flakes of my own charred flesh swirling around me. I am being pulled apart, but I feel light as I am relieved of my brittle, heavy bones, my tight muscles and ligaments, my thick, suffocating skin.

I am nothing but a whisper, no mortal body left to hold me to the earth.

SHOUTOUT TO @behold-the-infinitum FOR BEING MY STRAWMAN LOL