An Ode to Muses to Melpomene

Caesar's Reincarnation

Tell me the title of this book in Ancient Greek

And annotate your dearest quotes.

You smell like the ghosts of my ill-fated memories,

So, I read you myths of gothic fantasies.

I write my comments in the margins of novels with cracked spines

And piece together the missing pages from your broken language.

While I know this may seem like a fairy tale,

It may end up published in Brothers' so very Grimm.

Now, your blue pen stains my sheets,

As I read the words you left for me to translate.

I exchange monologues of a caged incubus,

For your stories of succubus,

Trading your sanity, for foreplay.

You look at me with a raven's gaze as I recite my trepidations

And hide your stare in the shelter of low-hanging branches.

We share two faces

And only dare to turn one forward.

You think you see where I travel when my voice rattles and eyes no longer connect to my soul,

While I know that you hold back reins and commit self-flagellation in my shadow.

The melancholy of this evening blows into the clock tower,

While the dew of the grass stabs my toes,

As we ponder and watch the trees shiver,

Feed the monsters that await our scraps,

And decorate Selene's sky with black widows.

Make love to me in the graves of our past lovers.

Write your name across my headstone,

So that I remember this moment when the world stops spinning and I finally go to sleep.

I may not have a tomb of fortunes

And my coffin will not shield me from beasts,

But you are my favorite phantom.

I ask you to come and lay beside me,

As black cobras do with their victims,

Except in death, both are cold-blooded.

I cannot carry you on my back as you do with our doctrines.

You swing my burdens over your shoulder,

While I hold the manuscript of salvation.

I pray to a God with a name foreign to yours

And ask him to grant you a purpose to live.

Spare me the details of the nightmares that haunt your final resting place,

Where everything is black and white

And your mattress is stained with the Devil's success story.

It was frozen in secrets,

Creeping up, to ice your veins.

Look at me before you fly to gravity's command,

Realize that I tied wires around your feet,

Bound myself to you as the chain of my cross,

Call my demons by your name,

And kiss the one in damnation.

I punch my eyes until they turn blue and slap myself pink.

You say you are colorblind,

But recognize the watercolors of my sinister smile, drenched in my saliva-diluted blood.

I speak in hypocrisies,

While disrespecting the status of the leather-bound pages I caress.

With the dripping of my pleasures.

Drape yourself in sheep's skin as I wear black satin.

You ask if I need to be clothed.

I only feel warmth under midnight's guise,

Where Victorian lamps accompany me home on dusk drizzled with tears,

While I pry my heart open, so you may touch hail in this rain.

Now, angels wake me with the chimes of vengeful wind,

Collecting sins from my heaving chest,

Where a gaping hole invades my lungs,

And a curved dagger colonizes my abdomen.

It descends from my grasp, as I attempt to surrender.

I loosen the strings of my stitches while it plunges from me into you,

When I recall your final statement,

"Et Tu?"