her dark majesty

I woke before the frost had a hold upon the whole of the world, where ice feathered its touch over every exposed skin and the stars were so cold and bright. That shuffling muddled routine of making ready for the life expected, the odd combination of coffee and shower steam and the frozen indolence of a dumb commute. That turncoat exclamation of this known country, the slow speeding certainty that with each mile traveled she becomes further from me. Each day I drive towards another dawn, her magic everything that I will never know or become. Each day I wake, her absence a sweet and brutal truth.

Love is all about the ache to know, the beauty of the splendid trope, the revelation of continuity wrecked upon these certain sheets. Romance is all in the loitering of lurid hope, the clinging to the hips of the idea, the press of lips sealing some furtive letter. I endure the lack of both, though without love I do not thrive, and without romance I really do not even try. She is that secreted notion, that shadow that will fall across my shoulder, that smile that will find me out. Somewhere she writes it all down, her ink stitched into her bare limbs, her ink trickling brightly down her throat. Somewhere she sets the world in motion, and I feel her labors in the machinery beneath my feet.

My job is the tangle of lack mingled with the moral certitude of the state. It is those who were never loved enough entrusted to my cruel and potent ministry, the trust that evil can be undone, that souls can be saved from the more heritable kinds of misery. It doesn't suit me, and I fail each day to undo some deep crime, the criminals always far from my reckoning. Somewhere she lingers, a remedy for my own calamity. Somewhere she shines, dark and honest and indifferent to my worn entreaties and my tired poems. She endures, accosted and yet untouched by these brittle longings. I watch as another day dies unloved, waiting for her darkness to arrive. I watch these empty streets with vacant eyes as all the stars come out.